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Using it:::…

So much for the standard information, it’s time to plug this baby in and put it to good use.

The card goes into a free PCI slot and you connect the power cable and AD Link cable.

It’s a very straightforward installation, once Windows starts up you finish the installation by installing the drivers and software.

Benchmarking

I had to figure out how to best this piece of hardware and I think I found something. These are the specs of the test machine:

• AMD Athlon XP 3000
• Asus A7V8X Main board
• 1024 MB DDR Memory (400MHz)
• Geforce FX 5950 Video card
• Windows XP SP2 (DirectX 9.0c)
• Creative Inspire 6.1 Speaker set (analogue speakers)
• I used one of the first Audigy 2 cards for comparison in most benchmarks.

3DMark03 version 250

3DMark is known for its graphical benchmarks but this version also hosts a series of audio tests.

I used these tests for the Audigy 4.

This test basically mimics a sound engine in a game and it’s easy to measure the performance with sound on and off.

Here you clearly see the impact of the sound for the benchmark. Interesting is that the Audigy 2 seems the more efficient option when 60 discrete sounds are used. Quite why the difference is so great with sound disabled is a rather a mystery.

RightMark Audio Analyzer 5.4

“RMAA suite is designed for testing quality of analog and digital paths of any audio devices, be it a sound card, an MP3 player, a consumer CD/DVD player or an acoustic set. The results are obtained by playing and recording test signals passed through the tested audio path by means of frequency analysis algorithms. A more common mark is also provided for those unfamiliar with measured technical parameters.”

As taken from the RightMark website, it covers the load nicely.

You can see which tests it performs; I’ve used the default values.

Here are the results:

Here you can see that the frequency response deviations are close to zero; that is excellent, the noise levels are very low, which is very good; the dynamic range is high, which is also very good.

The total harmonic distortion (THD) is zero percent and the inter-modulation distortion (IMD) is almost zero percent.

Stereo Crosstalk is also very low and the IMD swept frequency is close to zero percent.

This means the card scores excellent across the board.

I have compared it against the Audigy 2 and also thrown in a SoundMax audio card for fun, this card comes free onboard an Intel 915 Board, and it’s mostly a low range integrated soundcard.

The SoundMax scores considerably worse, you can really see the difference in quality there.

For those of you that want the graphs, they can be produced upon request.

Here’s a table that shows the results for the other frequencies.

When 44 KHz is used in the test you see that the IMD is higher then the other times.

This is caused by the fact that the Audigy runs on 48 KHz internally and has to change back to 44 KHz because the test requires it.

And since 44 KHz isn’t exactly a multiple like 96 and 192 KHz are, this is going to give some problems here and there.

Rightmark 3DSound 1.24

Another benchmark from Rightmark, this benchmark tests the hard and software capabilities of a DirectSound compatible card.

It’s a synthetic benchmark designed to replicate the main cycle of a typical sound engine within a game.

This benchmark suit comes with a data analyzer that analyzes the data produced during the test and filters the random OS activity bursts to display the test results.

For some strange reason I couldn’t get this analyzer to work, which left me stuck with the data of the transfer rate recorded in the log.

The transfer rate is tested by loading sound wave data into a static buffer.

Interestingly enough the transfer rate increased when the breakout box was connected.