Installation:::...

It's only ever happened once before but when I tried to fit the Hollywood@Home into its PCI slot it simply refused to go. After a few minutes of fiddling I eventually decided to remove the end plate completely at which point it slotted in with no problem.

As you can see from he picture below where the Hollywood@Home sits alongside a Hercules DigiFire, the end plate sits too far off the end of the card which throws the alignment out by a critical couple of millimeters. Interestingly I noticed that the mounting screw holes and socket holes on both cards were identically placed so I swapped them over at which point the Hercules refused to fit and the Gainward was fine.

End Plate Misalignment

I could no doubt have made the Gainward fit with a little strategic bending, and it may also not be an issue is a slightly more forgiving case, but as no other PCI or AGP based card I have to hand here has ever caused this kind of problem I felt it my duty to mention it. I have spoken to Gainward about the problem and they're investigating.

Drivers:::...

With the card physically in place all that remained was to install the drivers. Fortunately this was a considerably simpler task with the installation CD auto-running and offering the relatively idiot-proof options of either installing or uninstalling the "Envy24 Family Audio Device Driver".

Once complete you get an entry in your program menu and an icon in your system tray, both of which give you access to the following driver panels.

Playback Options

Record Options

SPDIF Options

Speaker Config Options

Advanced Control Options

Information Panel

My immediate problem when testing came from the speaker configurations. Initially I wanted to test on a regular 4.1 speaker setup, and because the speakers had only a front and rear input with no discrete sub/centre (LFE/center) channel it made sense to configure the speakers using the 4 channel option. The problem here though was that all I got from the 4 channel setting was 2 channels of sound, front left and front right? even using a single amplified speaker and trying each socket individually I could only get an output from the two front channels??

In the end I found that the only was I could get 4.1 sound was to use the 6 channel configuration and downmix the LFE and center channels to the regular front channels. With hindsight this is possibly the better way to do it but it doesn't explain the lack of four channels of audio in four channel mode.

Eventual 4.1 Configuration Used

You may have noticed that every set of sliders has a tick box badged "St Gang". When I first saw this I wondered what on earth it was, so I took a quick scan through the e-manual and....well....nothing! So I next hovered my cursor over the box waiting for that wonderfully enlightening box to pop up and explain everything away....and....errr......nothing again.
Luckily it has quite a basic unction, it simply binds the left and right sliders together so as you adjust one you adjust them both equally. Okay, so it wasn't too difficult to discover the meaning with a little tinkering, and yes I'm kind of embarrassed that the penny didn't drop sooner, but a clue might have been nice all the same.

By far the biggest disappointment for me is the total lack of any kind of sound quality adjustment. No Bass slider, no Treble slider, no simple equalizer presets, nothing! In fact all you're able to do is change the volume to or mute each of the channels individually, a useful feature in itself but a touch limiting when it's the only one.