Videologic
SonicVortex2 review
Posted by Thomas
McGuire on November 2, 1999 - Page 2/4
Company:
Videologic
Systems Product: SonicVortex
2 PCI
Drivers/
Software
I
got the latest drivers for the card from Aureal.
For obvious reasons such as bug fixes, improvements, etc.
Weighing in at 35MB for the complete download (larger than
Liveware 3.0) I was expecting some nice things to come with
it.
Although
there was technical improvements to the card, such as
increasing the maximum number of voices in Wavetable mode
from 320 to 576 voices. There was a severe lack of much else
in the drivers other than more technical demos.
In
this area Creative has won. The Liveware downloads (&
original drivers) gave use the Creative Playcenter &
AudioHQ, plus the Surround Mixer. They gave the SoundBlaster
Live cards a lot of customisation options. Disappointingly,
Aureal give us nothing but the standard Windows CD player
& Volume control.
The
Jet-audio system was upgradeable after I took a look at the
Videologic website. The version that came bundled was 3.22.
The upgrade available brought this up to 4.52. Nice.
Specifications
Lets
start by listing of the specifications of this card, for
these purposes I use the specs with the latest drivers,
rather than what you get out of the box as the new drivers
add/update a few things.
Audio
processor:
Aureal Vortex 2 AU8830 PCI audio processor featuring 92
stream DirectSound acceleration; A3D 2.0 with 76 channels
(16 3D source & 60 3D reflections); 576 voice wavetable,
DLS & Microsoft DirectMusic support; separate AC97
compliant codec.
Signal
to noise ratio: Better
than –100dB A-weighted (-94dB unweighted).
Sample
rates:
Up to 48kHz playback/record.
S/P-DIF
output sample rates:
32, 44.1 & 48kHz.
External
connectors:
2 stereo headphone/line out jacks, line in jack,
microphone in jack, 15 pin game/midi port, S/P-DIF optical
out jack.
Internal
connectors:
CD-in, Aux-in, TAD-in, wavetable header.
Drivers:
Windows 95, 98 DOS & Windows NT 4. DirectSound,
DirectSound 3d, Aureal A3D 1.0 & 2.0.
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