The Diamond MX300 Vortex 2 AU8830 soundcard
( part 1)
January 26, 1999
Introduction
It is with a great interest that we started this analyse because the Diamond MX300 soundcard is the youngest of a new soundcard series based on the Aureal Vortex 2 AU8830 audio Chipset. This Chipset is packed of new features not available in the first edition of this Chipset and it is therefore much more powerful that its predecessor. As a fact, the Aureal AU8830 can be considered as a serious opponent to the Creative Labs EMU10K1 installed on the Live and Live Value soundcards of this manufacturer. It is with a great pleasure that we are inviting you to discover with us this new product in the following analyse we are publishing here.
Installation
The installation of this soundcard is rather unusual and a bit different compared to what we are used to see with many other pieces of hardware. As a fact, the Diamond MX300 is requiring at least 50Mb of free hard disk drive space to install. So, we had to clear some space on our own hard disk drive to make some room for the installation of this soundcard as we were using almost all of the available capacity of our disk drive at this moment. During the installation process of this soundcard the Win95 installation disk is required, so, you must make sure to have it close to you before to start this installation. Once the installation has been completed on our system, there was no sound and we were not invited to reboot the computer as there has been no message to tell us to do so. However, as soon as we rebooted our computer, Windows detected, installed and enabled the new hardware and then the Windows ouverture sound played. A bit unusual as we told you, isn't it?
The Software Bundles
The applications included on this bundle are not very numerous but they are very interesting. However, there are 3 additional CD included with games and fun stuff such as: Recoil, Half-Life day one as well as a DVD version of the "Interactive" magazine. The audio applications included on the installation CD are: a mixer, a configuration control panel, a multimedia player and a WAVE file editor.
The following pictures will introduce to you in their real size every audio applications accompanied by a short description.
Below is the image of the configuration control panel:
As we can see, the MX300 has the ability to reproduce 320 voices with the help of the included wavetables. There is also the possibility to use downloadable DLS wavetables and use them instead of the ones included. A bunch of digitalized audio effects are also available and they an be cascaded to have two of them used at the same time. All the 9 audio effects included are internally hardware supported by the AU8830. Of course, this soundcard is offering unconditional support for the A3D environmental sound effect developed by Aureal and available on countless 3D games. It is also possible to use 4 different speakers to gain even more profit of the A3D sound effect.
Finally, instead of the eternal bass and treble controls, the MX300 is including a 10 bands equalizer for a much more flexible tweaking of the audio reproduction. We must congratulate Diamond here for this great idea because it is much more interesting to use a 10 bands equalizer than only a bass and a treble control to fine tune the audio to fit much closer to our tastes.
Below, we have the picture of the mixer included with this soundcard. We had to squeeze it a little bit because the original size is taking the full screen width. So, to make it more easily viewable we reduced it to its actual size but we lost some readability of the printed characters in this process. Please accept our apology for this drawback.
The next application, as pictured below, is a multimedia player able to read any MiDi, AVI, WAVE files as well as audio CD.
As you can see, Diamond had another great idea here by grouping the reading of all multimedia files into a single player instead of using a different one like it is the case most of the time.
Finally, the WAVE file editor is pictured right down below.
We can see that many editing possibilities are offered by this applications to allow you to efficiently edit your WAVE files.
continued on next page with:
The listening and Spectral Analysis
