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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on November 14, 2001
Manufacturer: Terratec Product:
SoundSystem SiXPack 5.1+
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Drivers
The Drivers for the
SiXPack 5.1 are a semi-disappointing affair for the most
part. First off the Drivers (WDM) only support Windows 98SE,
Me, 2000 & presumably XP Drivers will be available soon
as well (Not at the time of writing though). Personally I
would have liked to have seen VXD Drivers available for
earlier Windows Operating systems also for the simple reason
they are still highly popular, that & VXD Drivers tend
to perform better than WDM Drivers do for the most part
(Again, this would be of more benefit to those with Windows
98SE/Me or earlier, not 2000). The Driver installation
itself sticks fairly rigidly to the Cirrus Logic reference
Drivers. Here’s a comparison between the Setup utility
offered by TerraTec & Cirrus Logic.
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TerraTec
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Cirrus
Logic
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Next I shall whinge about
the Control Panel however.
Strangely enough the
Control Panel for the Soundcard is not installed when
upgrading/installing the Drivers (Rather you would use the
Windows Volume Control Application, assuming you have
installed it). This has to be installed separately from the
Driver CD, or downloaded from TerraTec, i.e. the Control
Panel is completely separate to the Drivers. Compared with
all the other Soundcards I’ve tested this is a first, for
me at least. To confuse things a bit further the Drivers
actually do come with a Control Panel that isn’t
installed (Kind of defeats the purpose of it being in the
Drivers then doesn’t it). After manually placing this into
the WINNT\system32 directory though it showed up in
my Control Panel as SoundFusion Audio. This as it
turns it turns out is a slightly newer version to that
included in the Cirrus Logic reference Drivers.
Even more... annoying
than this is that this particular Control Panel applet
actually features pop-up help files for each setting,
whereas the official TerraTec Utility doesn’t feature any
Help feature.
Once you do get around to
using TerraTec’s Control Panel (Which as it happens you
load via the Start Menu/Other Shortcut to it rather than
looking in the Control Panel) it’s pretty much on a par
with the Control Panels available with other CS4630 based
Soundcards. Once loaded you’ll be brought to the Playback
tab.
Here you can adjust the
Volume levels for the various Audio Channels. The Game
Theater XP offers a similar feature, although this can be
adjusted per Channel (Not just for Front/Rear Speakers).
Next up is the Sources tab.
This
section allows you to adjust the volume level for different
Audio sources, apply a 20 dB boost to the Microphone, mute
various Sources, or adjust the Left/Right Audio Balance for
Sources too.
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