MagicWave PCI A3D

June 12, 1998

Last addendum June 17 , 1998

The installation of this soundcard is a bit less straight forward than the other soundcards I installed lately. As a fact the Win95 CD is required several times during installation so I had to switch back and forth between the Win95 CD and the MagicWave CD to complete the installation. On the other hand, after I installed this soundcard, my system boot-up time was considerably slower. So, I uninstalled all the drivers for this card and I used to run Scandisk on my HDD and when finished I finally used to defragment my hard disk drive. When all this has been carefully accomplished I re-installed the MagicWave drivers and re-booted the computer to see how fast it would boot. The boot time was slower than my standard boot time but much better than before I used to clean my hard disk drive so I strongly recommend that you do a good clean-up on you HDD before to install this soundcard so it wont slow down your boot time too much.

Once the drivers installation is completed you can go to the audio application installation included on this CD. These applications are as numerous as they are on the Aztech SC128 installation CD so you really have plenty of stuff to play round.

As a fact, the installation CD of this soundcard includes the Voyetra Audio Station, the Yamaha Y-XG50 software synthesizer, DirectX5, some A3D demos and some other applications. As a bonus, there even is an additional CD containing a demo version of Jedi Knight (Dark Force II) ! Finally, a very detailed hard copy user's guide is also included.

By the way this soundcard is based on the Aureal Vortex 8820 audio Chipset and is supporting 128 voices with a 4mb wavetable.

The overall quality of this wavetable is very fine and very interesting. Very well balanced, this wavetable never does any excess. The quality of its sounds is very good and never sounds artificial like many other soundcards. For my personal taste I would have preferred a bit more presence in the bass but because this wavetable is really flat in its frequency response the bass is never louder than the high frequencies are. All the instruments are very pleasant to listen to without any metallic resonance or aggressivity. In short, this soundcard is reproducing the music without letting the listener feel its presence.

On the other hand, the audio reproduction qualities of this soundcard are confirmed by its very good signal to noise ratio of 90db. As a fact this is the cleanest soundcard I have been listening to lately.

Unfortunately, this soundcard is not equipped of any tone controls so you can't balance the bass and treble levels. Furthermore, there are actually no way to manage the wavetable so you can't choose between different wavetables (2mb, 4mb, 8mb) as it is the case on many soundcards. I found these missing features very disappointing and I hope that MagicWave will do something to correct this situation in a very near future because in my opinion it is not only pleasant but indispensable to be able to choose the size a the wavetable we intend to use even if this is only for the sake of saving some memory to use for other applications ! As a fact, I learned that there are new drivers in development for these features but no date has been confirmed yet about when these new drivers will be available.



However, I/O Magic did a very smart move when developing this card drivers. As a matter of fact, they did a control center which is including all the essential elements having an impact on the sound. So they included in this control center 6 icons and 4 tabs which are allowing the user to access any of the most used settings of the soundcard. The 6 icons are those of the mixer, the digital tape recorder, the CD player, the multimedia configuration group, the multimedia player, and the joystick configuration window. The 4 tabs are the general control center, the midi settings, the A3D settings and the A3D demos selection window. This is a very brilliant idea and it save's to the user's the need to run everywhere to find these elements !

Using this card under DOS is a breeze. As a fact all you have to do is to copy the lines added by the installation of this soundcard in your Win95 config.sys and autoexec.bat and paste them in your DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat files using a text editor. If you don't have or don't want to use MS-DOS 6.22 then all you have to do is to use the "Reboot computer to MS-DOS mode" of the shut down menu and you have nothing else to do other than choose the appropriate soundcard in you game setup menu because the installation of this soundcard already wrote the required lines in the config.sys and autoexec.bat files used when you choose the "Reboot computer to MS-DOS mode". So, I have been able to easily use my games under DOS 6.22 as well as the DOS 7 of Win95. The only flaw I saw was that the MPU401 emulation couldn't be used under these modes and I had no other choice than to use the Sound Blaster FM chip emulation to play the music instead of the wavetable general Midi sounds but this could be caused by a wrong setting of my system, I don't know as I didn't really had the time to investigate it!.

Below are two pictures of some of the control panels of this soundcard. The first one is a picture of the control center I was talking about sooner.



The second picture is showing the Midi control panel


Listening to complex wave files extracted from audio CD's is a very pleasant experience with this soundcard. As a fact this is one of the best audio quality I've been hearing since a long time ! So, there are no specific problems to use this soundcard for such applications.

The many input and output jacks on this soundcard are including; a mic in, a line in, an amplified speaker (line out) jack, an unamplified speaker or earphone jack and a midi/joystick jack.


The strong points

The strong points of this soundcard are: the installation CD which is including numerous audio applications, the bonus CD including a Jedi Knight (Drak Force II) demo, the good quality wavetable, a very good user 's manual and the ease to use DOS access.


The weak points

The only real regrets I had for this soundcard were: the absence of tone controls for the bass and treble levels adjustment and a missing wavetable manager which are both making us hoping to get a new driver very soon to correct these lacks.


For more aditionnal informations visit I/O Magic web site.

Addemdum

Many peoples reported problems when trying to install XG Studio software and/or the YG20 software. According to I/O Magic on both programs the file (_INST32I.EX_) were corrupted during the CD duplication process. So I/O Magic released new files to fix these problems. To correct the problem copy the content of the XG Studio or Yg-20 sub-directories (found under the Yamaha-128 directory of the installation CD) to a temporary directory on your Hard disk drive, download the appropriate file and replace the corrupted file in your temp directory with this new file. Run the setup.exe file from your hard disk drive and you should be able to install the corresponding program.



Cilck here to get the patch file for the XG Studio software

Cilck here to get the patch file for the YG20 software


DETAILED FEATURES
System Interface
  • 32-bit PCI Bus Master with 48-channel DMA interface, PCI 2.1 compliant
  • < 0.5% PCI Bus Bandwidth for playing 16-bit/stereo/44.1KHz
Wavetable Synthesis
  • Professional, studio-quality, 64-voice wavetable synthesis
  • Programmable effects including reverb and chorus
  • General MIDI 1.0 support
A3D-Interactive Engine
  • Real-time interactive sound movement
  • HRTF processing:
  1. Location cues – panning, frequency and intensity
  2. Distance cues – reflections and atmospheric absorption
  3. Movement cues – Doppler effects
  4. Speaker and headphone output supported
DirectSound Acceleration
  • Hardware sample rate convert to 48 KHz from any sample rate
  • Enhanced effects (reverb, chorus.)
Software Compatibility
  • Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster Pro
  • AdLib
  • Windows 95
  • DirectSound
  • DirectInput
  • Microsoft Active X
Hardware Interfaces
  • MPU-401 interface with FIFO
  • High-performance game port
Record and Playback
  • Full-duplex stereo operation for simultaneous record and playback
  • 16-bit stereo ADC and DAC
  • 48 kHz sample rate
Inputs/Outputs
  • 4 stereo inputs for line-in, CD, AUX IN, VIDEO
  • One mono input for microphone
  • One phone input and one mono output
  • PC speaker input
  • Line output or Speaker Output (2 watt-Output per channel)