X-bit labs

Contemporary Integrated Sound Solutions. Part II (page 8)

Category: Multimedia

by Sergey Samarin

[ 11/04/2003 | 09:21 PM ]

Now, let’s get acquainted with the Audio Deck panel:

The control panel is divided into six pages: Playback, Record, SPDIF, Speaker Config, Advanced Control and Information. The panel window is quite large (730x492) and will not scale down (it would be larger than the Desktop in 640x480 resolution!).

Playback

The Playback page contains volume controls for the components of the speaker system. You can mute any channel or adjust channel volumes in pairs (the “St.Gang” option). Usually, this option is called Link. Moreover, it is bad style to use abbreviations in control panels.

Note also that there is an indicator of the signal level, next to each slider. However, this function remained unimplemented, to my regret.

Record

The Record page is in charge of amplifying the selected audio source (the list of sources is to the right of the sliders). Here you also enable certain advanced features: Remove Recording Noise and Enhance Mic Recording Sensitivity. The first is for suppressing the noise during recording and the second is for switching between the sensitivity modes of the microphone.

SPDIF

There are only two items in this page. Enable Digital Output sends the sound to the digital connectors. Enable Hi Sampling Rates (96kHz) does what it promises – turns on the 96kHz sample-rate mode.

Speaker Config

Your speaker system is set up in this page. Note also that you can quickly select your speaker system from any page by clicking the appropriate icon above. When 5.1 mode (6 channel) is on, you gain access to DualMax functions for hardware signal down-mixing “Downmix LFE/Center DAC to Front channel” and “Downmix Surround to Front channel” (the DualMax function is implemented directly in the VT1616 codec). By placing your mouse pointer over a component of your speaker system, you should hear a test signal from this satellite.

Advanced Control

The name of this page is rather confusing, since there are no advanced functions here. We have only two options:

• Enable Microsoft Speaker Icon on Taskbar: it sets the standard channel mixer icon into the Taskbar;
• Load Control Panel at Microsoft Windows Start: no comment necessary.

From this page, you also enable the Sensaura 3D Positional Audio mode as well as reproduction of stereo across a multi-channel speaker system (“Channel Extension (2Ch to Multi-Ch)”). After activating/deactivating the Sensaura mode, you have to reboot your system, which is rather inconvenient.

Information

You can read the driver version and names of the library files here.

As you see, this version of the Audio Deck is rather an offhand product. The software developers didn’t have enough time to do everything right. I hope the next version will include all necessary corrections.