Good Card, but drivers need work

One of the things I have come to appreciate is real-time dolby digital live (DDL) encoding: Play any game, movie, mp3 file on your PC, and transfer it with a single coax or optical cable to your home theater receiver. If you have real-time DDL working correctly, the you will always hear sound from all speakers, no matter what the input (stereo is expanded etc.). Plus, of course, directional sounds will come from the appropriate corners.

I have been spoiled with this feature from my ABIT NF7-S 2.0 motherboard, which has this feature implemented through the on-board NVIDIA Nforce2 Soundstorm MCP-T chip. This solution simply works, with no crashes, no static, no problems. However, this chip has been discontinued, so you're stuck using only AthlonXP's, unless you find a similar feature on a dedicated soundcard or on newer boards. These alternatives currently include the X-Mystique, X-Plosion, Montego DDL, Intel HD Audio, and maybe a few others. I decided to give the X-Plosion a try, since I like that it also can do real-time DTS encoding called "DTS Connect" (DTS equivalent to DDL), which has higher bitrate and lower latency than DDL.

So I thoroughly compared the X-Plosion against the Soundstorm. I use thorougly updated Windows 2000, newest drivers as of this writing, 1 gig ram, Athlon XP 3000 , Radeon AIW 800XT.

Sadly, the X-Plosion was ultimately returned to the store:

My biggest gripe was sudden static - for example, when playing UT2k4, the game sounds would suddenly be replaced with something like white noise, only worse, and quite loud. This would happen out of the blue and cease only when triggering completely new sounds, or sometimes even only by quitting the game.

Second, if one switched back and forth between DDL and DTS a few times, the sound card control applet would also crash, requiring a restart of the PC.

Third, one had to choose between a.) an auto-mute feature (enabled by default) that would turn off with a slight delay, thereby cutting off the first second or so of a sound or b.) forcing the DDL / DTS stream to be created continuously even during silence by enabling the "Karaoke" function. However, this seemed to lead to even more lock-ups, and also overlaid all channels with a faint background static. On the soundstorm, there is no background hiss, and the DDL stream is always on. Sometimes the cessation of the DDL stream during periods of silence would also confuse the communication to the home theater receiver, causing garbled sound or a sudden change in received channels. Basically, the X-Plosion is by default not sending a nice continuous DDL / DTS stream, and instead is prone to causing loss of synchronisation.

Fourth, the X-Plosion sadly had higher CPU utilization than the soundstorm - ca. 12% on the X-Plosion vs. ca. 4% or less on the soundstorm, with no clearly discernible auditory advantage (say better sound positioning or similar) to the X-Plosion. Maybe the X-Plosion is a bit better in DTS, but it was not an earth shattering difference.

So in conclusion, I went back to the soundstorm. Why? Simple: It works and never acts up, unlike the X-Plosion, which hassles me with sudden static, control panel crashes, sync loss, and background hiss.

I love the idea of DTS Connect and hate to give this promising product a poor review, but at the very least the drivers need work. Maybe this will push them! I'm no fan of Creative either (an audigy2 went back just as quickly), I'll stick to my soundstorm and AthlonXP until I find a convincing alternative.