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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on January 22, 2001
Company: Videologic Product:
SonicFury
Volume
control
The
SonicFury features the standard Mixer controls for
you to set your volume levels (The only omission being that
the Master volume level is in the Main
section). The SonicFury also features a handy 10 band
Graphic Equaliser for those who like to tweak their sound
quality to perfection.
As
you can see it comes with 8 preset settings to begin with,
although you’re free to tune it as you wish, it may also
be Enabled/Disabled as needed, this is fairly useful as I
normally Disable it before I load up a game.
Music
audio quality
The
audio quality with music (CD’s basically) was quite good,
particularly when using the appropriate Equaliser preset.
That said, there were a few issues encountered with other
music formats.
MP3’s
while they would play fine, it seems that the MP3
Acceleration feature isn’t working entirely correctly.
By this I mean, the SonicFury isn’t hardware accelerating
MP3 playback with all Media players (Which would reduce CPU
utilization as the SonicFury would be doing the decoding of
MP3’s). To test this out I used System Monitor &
Windows Media Player 7. Playing a short, 192Kbps MP3 with
MP3 Acceleration Enabled & Disabled the following CPU
utilization results were obtained.
As
you can see there is no real difference in CPU utilization
whether it was Enabled or Disabled simply because it’s not
working. As reported on 3D
Soundsurge, MP3 Acceleration appears to work fine on
Windows Media Player 6.4 & Voyetra
AudioStation
4 (Bundled with the SonicFury). That said, it’s not
entirely an important issue (Given the speed of CPU’s used
now), although hopefully future driver revisions will Enable
this feature with a wider range of media players.
Midi
support is sufficient, although largely untested for the
simple reason I don’t use it & the only possible thing
I can think of that I own I could test it with would be Duke
Nukem 3D’s music. That said, Midi won’t be of much
importance to most users anyway.
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