The
SonicXplosion DVD touts itself as being the “world’s
first complete home cinema sound card”, a fairly bold
claim. On a basic level the SonicXplosion DVD is a
repackaged TerraTec SiXPack 5.1 bundled with WinDVD 4. This
is by no means a bad thing as the SonicFury was a repackaged
Santa Cruz – highly regarded by many.
Out of the box, the
SonicXplosion DVD comes with a printed quick install guide
and an html manual which is available from the bundled CD,
something we are getting used to see more often nowadays, so
for beginners this should do just fine as most
troubleshooting topics are covered: hardware installation,
updating drivers, using the Control Panel, etc.
Installation of the
Soundcard itself went along smoothly; among the extra stuff
that came in the package we have the optional MIDI/Gameport
bracket, the length of cable for this bracket is enough to
allow you some flexibility with where you want to place this
bracket should you need it. Both CD’s that came with the
card offered a plethora of 3rd party software,
several being full versions, e.g. Jet Audio & the others
being demos. The main attraction is of course WinDVD; if you
are mostly interested in how the card performed in gaming or
DVD playback you might want to jump to those sections
directly.
The
SonicXplosion includes WDM Drivers for Windows 98SE, Me,
2000 & XP and although I didn’t test this, the card
should also support Drivers for the TerraTec SiXPack 5.1 in
much the same way the SonicFury could use Turtle Beach Santa
Cruz Drivers. This didn’t matter however, as the current
PURE Digital build was the same as the latest from TerraTec.
Shown
beneath is the Playback tab of the Control Panel,
which allows you to adjust the volume level for various
channels.
Much
like TerraTec’s Control Panel no Help File is included as
regards the options available here, though PURE Digital do
have an article entitled “Using the SonicXplosion Control
Panel” which explains the options available, personally
I’d have preferred this integrated into the Control Panel
for sake of convenience, but anyway. The Sources
& Record tabs offers the expected usual options
as regards controlling volume levels for numerous sources,
as well as left/right balance & Acoustic Echo
Cancellation configuration (Or AEC as the Control
Panel somewhat unhelpfully labels it).
As
regards the Digital Out configuration the Digital
In Source (Direct) option is a pass-through mode,
allowing you to send a digital signal to the S/PDIF In &
out the S/PDIF Output. An example of where this could be
used would be, say, to connect your DVD Players Optical S/PDIF
Output to the SonicXplosion’s S/PDIF Input & have the
SonicXplosion’s S/PDIF Output connected to a Dolby
Digital/DTS decoder. In this way you could have both devices
connected to the decoder without requiring cable swapping.
For
performance sake both digital in/output can be disabled
by selecting Off. The EQ tab features a
10-band hardware equaliser, while the MIDI tab allows you
to adjust various MIDI playback
options. I will cover more in detail the 3D Settings
later on.
Overall
while the Drivers did offer great stability the Control
Panel will likely be somewhat confusing to the less
experienced due to no built-in help feature. As explained
next the Drivers could well do with an update to 2 to add
certain features/functionality for gaming as well.
You can read full system specifications
on next page, if you want to skip that, click
here.
