Review Info

Outrageous 3D Sound

Summary

This is an excellent A3D2 card with a great bundle and very good sound quality.  

Introduction

Long the sound-area was dominated by one company – Creative. Others tried to rock the giant but didn’t do it very well. This was until Aureal released their first Vortex1 chip a few years ago. Now they have the Vortex2 chips out and the sound-arena (especially the 3D sound) area is finally bursting with competition.

This soundcard from Absolute Multimedia, a new company founded by ex Orchid and Diamond employees, uses the Vortex 2 AU8830 chipset.

Features

The Outrageous 3D is based on the SuperQuad reference board from Aureal. In fact it seems that this is exactly the reference design. This isn’t necessarily something bad as the design has been proven to work well.

Let’s take a look at the features of the board:

Audio processor:

· Aureal Vortex 2 AU8830

Codec:

· 18-bits quad CODEC

Bus Interface:

· PCI 2.1 bus master with 96 channel DMA interface3D/2D digital audio

Digital audio acceleration:

· 16 streams of A3D 2.0 acceleration with 64 wall reflections at 16-bits 48 kHz

· 76 streams of A3D 1.0 and DirectSound3D acceleration

· DirectSound acceleration (92 streams)

· Full duplex, 48 kHz digital recording and playback

· Sample rate conversion with 27-point interpolation

Synthesiser:

· Professional 320-voice wavetable synthesiser

· Reverb and effects: distortion, chorus, wah-wah, flang, delay

· General MIDI, DLS 1.0, DirectMusic support

· 4 MB of professional studio samples

Audio specifications:

· Exceeds PC98 and PC99 audio requirements

· SNR: 95 dB Typical

· Frequency response: 20Hz-20KHz ( -3 dB intercept )

Input and output connectors

Bracket connectors:

· Line output

· Line input

· Microphone input

· Game/MIDI port

· TOSLINK optical S/PDIF out

· Game/MIDI port

Internal connectors (all MPC3):

· CD input

· AUX (line) input

· TAD (modem) input/output

· Wavetable upgrade connector

Compatibility:

· Aureal A3D 1.0 and 2.0

· Microsoft DirectSound, DirectSound3D, DirectInput, DirectMusic

· Exceeds PC98 and PC99 audio requirements

· FCC and CE certified

· Sound Blaster Pro support (Real mode and DOS box)

· MPU-401 UART MIDI interface

With the latest released reference drivers the card also supports EAX 1.0.

I had to hunt around a bit to understand what you used the optical S/PDIF output for. AbsoluteMM say this on their site: “For the sophisticated user, a TOSLINK S/PDIF optical digital output is provided for digital connections to modern digital audio devices such as, Dolby Digital Recievers, DAT, CDR recorders, and MiniDisc”. I don’t have any of those so I can’t comment on how it works.

The card of course supports 4 speakers.

The box

Anyone who have seen a box from Orchid will recognize the Outrageous 3D Sound box. It has the same colours and a similar look. I guess the Orchid guys got to design the boxes.

Looking in the box you notice that, while there is no manual, you get not 1 CD but 5 CD’s. This is what you get:

• CD with Drivers + manual.
  The manual is contained in a PDF file and it’s ok I guess. Anyone should be able to install the card using it. It is available in 7 languages (English, Swedish, Danish, Finish, Norwegian, French and German). As an extra help for newbies a excellent little video is provided on the CD that shows all steps that are needed when installing the card. I’ve seen a similar video supplied with the GeForce card from AbsoluteMM and I think it’s a excellent way to give an idea what you need to do to install the card. Unfortunately you can’t have it running while doing the actual install (unless you have a second computer).
  

• WinDVD 1.2.90 – you get a serial number for it. This is a real coold DVD player. Coupled with DVDGenie 3.30 I even could turn on GeForce Motion Compensation support. It played the few DVD titles I had flawless and I couldn’t see any problem in the playback on any of them. It also has a lot of sound features with everything from surround sound to support for 6 speakers. The DVD’a s I watched had excellent sound.
  

• MusicMatch Jukebox 4.
  This is a MP3/CD-player. When you insert a CD it can connect to a database (and I can tell you it does this fast! A few seconds max) and provide you with the title and all the track-names. I tried it with a variety of CD’s from our CD-collection and while I expected it to succeed with Madonnas latest CD as well as Modern Talking’s latest (Madeleine’s, not mine – actually all are Madeleleine’s except Pet Shop Boys)  it also picked up Pet Shop Boy’s “Very” as well as Enya’s “The Celt’s” and Nordman’s “Nordman”.  This program can do more though. It also let’s you RIP CD-tracks and convert them to mp3 files. It’s very easily done- you just select the track you want to “record” and press record. The track is then converted to mp3 and placed in a folder corresponding to the Album/Artist. My track was named “Can You Forgive Her.mp3” and placed in folder Pet Shop Boys/Very. There is a downside with this program though. The version supplied only records in “Near CD Quality”. To record in “CD Quality” you need to upgrade for $29.95.
  

• Heretic II  - This game should have earned a better fate than it did. It did some nice things with the Quake engine using third person view.

• Thief – The Dark Project

• Half Life Day One – This game sounds great with A3D2. This is only a “demo” but it’s long and great.

• Descent 3 Sol Ascent – This is a 5 level version of Descent 3

The drivers shipped are just pure reference drivers.  This means you can safely install new reference drivers from Aureal. I used the latest drivers with support for EAX.

Games

Using the card in games ranging from Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena, Age Of Empire II and Allegiance beta was a joy. Even when not using A3D hardware acceleration the sound is very clear. It should be noted that I use headphones. Using A3D of course depends on the support in the games but a game like UT sounded real nice even though you have to expect a drop in performance.

Benchmarks

To benchmark this card I used ZD-Net’s Audio Winbemch 99.

The results are  a bit confusing. I get a CPU utilization around 1.5 percent at 8 bit, 22 kHz while other reviews have gotten a value around 0.3% and indeed my review of SB Live received similar low scores. I’ve used both the supplied drivers and the latest drivers but I receive the same results anyway. I just can’t explain it.

Summary

As you might have noticed I haven’t spoken anything about 4 speaker support, Dolby etc. It’s not because I’m uninterested but since I can’t test all these features I let others with better opportunities test those features. One good place for sound-related reviews is www.3dsoundsurge.com .

I like this card. It has a great bundle, good solid sound and a good price. The Diamond MX300 is priced just below this card here in Sweden but that card lacks suck things like a good bundle. If having to make a choice between the 2 I definitely would choose the Outrageous 3D Sound