|
Posted by Thomas
McGuire on November 14, 2001
Manufacturer: Terratec Product:
SoundSystem SiXPack 5.1+
Search
for lowest Soundcard
prices here.
 TerraTec
Electronics are a semi-well known company, depending on
where you happen to live at least. If you’re living in
Germany
then you probably have heard of them
before – they are the largest manufacturer of Soundcards
in
Germany
. The SoundSystem SiXPack 5.1 + is one of
their latest Soundcards & aimed mainly at the Gamer,
& those with 5.1 Speaker Systems.
Installation
Installing the SiXPack
5.1 was fairly simple, find a free PCI slot & insert it
in. Should you wish you can also connect the
MIDI/Gameport bracket up to the Soundcard as well – this
will also require a space to insert it as well (Not a PCI
slot itself though), the cable itself is long enough so that
it shouldn’t be an issue (In my case I wrapped the cabling
around my Hollywood Plus to place it in the free slot
beneath it). Upon booting up Windows 2000 the Soundcard was
detected & prompted to install Drivers for it (Windows
2000 comes with CrystalFusion Drivers, although I had
deleted these, so rather than being auto-installed I was
prompted for Drivers). Later on I’ll talk more about the
Drivers themselves.
Here’s
a shot of the Soundcard itself, along with the separate
MIDI/Gameport bracket.
Bundled
Software
The
SiXPack 5.1 comes bundled with the following variety of
Software:
-
InterVideo WinDVD
-
Musicmatch
Jukebox
-
Emagic Logic Fun
-
Free- &
Shareware
As you can probably
guess by far the most compelling Software bundled with the
SiXPack 5.1 is WinDVD 3.0 MultiChannel. A high quality,
albeit resource intensive Software DVD Decoder (Compared to
Power DVD 3.0 in my experience with it anyway). With regard
to Audio playback the bundled version of WinDVD 3.0 supports
the following Audio Output modes.
It’s worth noting
that this is the non-DTS version of WinDVD 3.0, although as
can be seen on the InterVideo website, the DTS version costs
$20 extra so it’s safe to assume that bundling the DTS
version of WinDVD 3.0 would just serve to increase the price
of the SiXPack 5.1. If you’re connected to a 5.1 Speaker
system with the available Analog outputs on the Soundcard
you can always use the 6 speaker mode for 5.1
playback of DVDs. It is of course worth mentioning that this
is the only situation in which you can get 6 Speaker output
from the SiXPack 5.1 (More on this later on), or with other
Software DVD decoders, e.g. Power DVD 3.0.
|
