Installation & Drivers

Getting the card working was damn easy, not something we should be surprised of anyway. I just took out the SoundBlaster Live! Card I had installed and popped in the MX400, connected the CD Audio In cable and we were ready to go.

Just for testing purposes I first installed the drivers that came in the retail package CD but quickly switched to newer drivers I had already downloaded from Diamond’s website. Everything seemed to work fine, even DOS drivers where installed (who needs them anyway!) but my major disappointment was the poor control you get over the card, I was really used to Creative’s deluxe control panel for controlling the sounds and settings but with the MX400 you won’t get more that a very small panel with a couple of settings.

Other than that, the rest of the bundled software is just ok. In the applications side you get a couple of very useful programs including Zoran’s SoftDVD player but in the games side, you get the OEM version of Slave Zero and Demolition Racer… not something was even worth putting in my CD drive for install. Finally, you get a complete User’s guide that covers all the basics including the installation of the card and a troubleshooting section that will be useful for rookies.

Sensaura’s MultiDrive & MacroFX

The MonsterSound MX400 features MultiDrive 3D Positional Audio, this might be one of the things Diamond and Sensaura have been talking about the most when promoting their card.

According to Sensaura, the way the Canyon3D manages audio sources has been much improved over Vortex2 based cards which only have got control over the front and rear group of speakers, so the effect you get (called “volume panning”) is pure sound interpolation between the two speakers, the MultiDrive technology instead consists in sending independent audio streams to each one of the speakers so the whole environment can be controlled more easily; for sure, sounds really good but is it really that good in actual gaming? We’ll see.

Another of the innovations on the MX400 is MacroFX effects which combined with DirectSound3D API can capture the sounds that are really close to the player in a game, that is, normally you would only get to hear sounds relatively near to you (say a “meter”) but with MacroFX you could hear sounds really near to you such as a whisper in the ear or something like that.

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