The Software

Accompanying the main audio card is an installation CD that contains all the drivers you need to install the software. It doesn’t take long at all to install if you choose the typical
ettings but you can of course determine your own custom settings if you like.

Click to enlarge

The player itself is basically identical to the Prelude which in itself is a different skin of Creative’s version.

The software is very easy to use and there are three modes to choose from:

• Entertainment
• Audio Creation
• Game

Unless you are looking to drastically change the sound and play around with distortion and other such effects on just specific parts of songs, like the chorus, I would suggest sticking to the entertainment and game modes as these are much simpler.

Firstly, the entertainment mode has a main display which consists of three dials: volume, bass and treble. Whacking up the bass is very effective and I soon have the floor booming with bass and running through the whole house!

Click to enlarge

From the main display there are a number of buttons that will take you to different modes so you can alter the sound in different ways to suit your tastes. If at any point you just want to wipe all the setting s you have chosen, there is a default settings button on the main display.

Right first up are the EAX settings, I briefly mentioned them before as being sound effects. In this instance they give the specific settings for simulating different locations and buildings. Overall, there are nine settings which all alter the sound quite dramatically especially if you whack up the effects amount to 12dB. My personal favourites were the royal hall and jazz club but that’s just personal taste. It’s good fun just playing around with those settings as although many other pieces of software have these kind of thing, I’ve never found any that are as good as this one at making the sound so different; as if you are actually there.

Click to enlarge

Another of my favourite things to play around with was the Crystallizer Basically this allows adjusting how ‘crystal clear’ the sound quality is. This means that the higher you put it the sharper the percussive sounds are (sharpens the drumming). For me, I really liked it as a certain Aerosmith song has a shaker for the intro and instead of fuzz you can clearly hear the shaker.

Click to enlarge

As with almost all sound cards you can adjust the EQ to suit the type of music you like listening to. There are a number of presets such as rock, classical pop etc but you can create your own. I like just shoving mine straight to rock and have done with it!

Click to enlarge

There are also options for adjusting surround sound settings. This panel is simple to work with, but due to me currently having a 2.1 setup, I was unable to test this to it’s maximum.

I’ll quickly show you the two other skins for game and audio creation modes; they use the same colour scheme of silver and blue but are adjusted to make them fit the particular mode.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge