MIDI

As noted in the bundle overview, the card also ships with the S-YXG50 and S-YXG100. These XG SoftSynthesizers offer 128 additional polyphonic sounds, with a total of 192 polyphony, hence the origination of the name, WAVEFORCE 192XG/192Digital which is further indication of the roots and strengths of this card. Again I am not a big MIDI user but I felt that with the S-YXG100 enabled GM quality was comparable with the SB Live. When listing to XG samples I thought the sound was even better.  The S-YXG100 is packed full of additonal XG feautures and effects.  All this does come at a price as the S-YXG100 used up 28 percent of CPU resources for the same GM file that took 6-9 percent to play using the 64 hardware XG voices. Bottom line is if you like MIDI and especially if you like the  XG format you should really check this card out.

I was able to use Creative's original EAX demo to test the various EAX settings. Overall they sound pretty good but as I noted before, the EAX quality is clearly behind the SB Live.

3D AUDIO

Heaphones

2 speakers

In games I found the two speaker audio to be excellent in a ‘you pick-em’ with Aureal's Vortex 2 which is slightly better than the Live’s two speaker Live!Ware 2.0 implementation. Again, no ZD audio subjective testing from me as the sounds drop out of existence soon after I start the test.

Again, Mikael’s configuration was able to run the ZD Audio test without a problem. He found that the Waveforce 192digital performed well on the up/down in the crashing glass test. He found also found the rear to be effective, about same as Vortex2 but not something that fooled him in anyway. I find the same thing for ZD audio 2 speaker tests. Logic lets you interpret the sound as being behind but unlike gaming situations, I am never tricked by any sound card in ZD audio into thinking sound is actually behind me. Mikael found the horizontal circle to be very good with 2 speakers, again similar to the Vortex2. Doppler effects also worked well in ZD audio and in games too. The vertical circle is also very good. Mikael sums up his ZD audio impressions with the following statement: "With two speakers I found it to be just as good as the Vortex2 in every case. Not identical but I can't really pick a winner and a loser. With headphones I found the circles to be better with the Vortex2 but in games I can't say there is a significant difference."

Benchmarks

Direct Sound:

Quake2 Massive 1 60.1 and 60.4 (two test runs same spec)

Quake2 Demo1 77.0 and 77.0

For perspective the SB Live got 60.2 60.1 and 76.4 76.4 respectively in the Quake 2 tests.

Direct Sound 3D

In our ZD Audio bench direct sound 3d tests the numbers are not as impressive.  CPU usage ranged from 5.22 percent  for eight 8 bit/22 kHz Static voices to 44.4 percent for thirty-two 16 bit/44.1 kHz Streaming voices (the Waveforce only supports  8 hardware 3d streams) . The best performer in this test (Vortex 2 ) has numbers below 0.5 percent for eight 8 bit/22 kHz Static voices and 1.47 percent for thirty-two 16 bit/44.1 kHz Streaming voices. 

DS3D with EAX:

Half-Life continues to be our best benchmarking tool for in game EAX performance.  Using the Celeron 300a at its default speed results in 22.12 FPS with EAX and 24.19 without and with the Celeron 300a overclocked to  450 MHz the results are 34.7 with EAX, 36.8 without.  These are very competitive results which are just a few frames per second behind the Live! using Liveware 1.0 drivers.  For details on how we benchmark in Half-Life and to see the results of several other soundcard you can check out our Half-Life benchmarking page (which is actually just a regularly updated part  of our full Half-Life review, which includes the results of playing it using four different sound cards!

DOS