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BlueGears X-Mystique 7.1 Review |
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Good, but not Creative (thankfully) |
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by Josh Walrath |
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The HDA X-Mystique 7.1 The card itself is impressive to behold. It has a black PCB accented by the gold backplate and gold stenciling. Many of the components on the board are silver and green in color, and all in all this is a very attractive board. It is definitely not boring to look at, and many case modders would be proud to showcase this card. The back plate has six mini-jack plugs for 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 use, as well line-in and mic-in. At the bottom are the coax and optical digital outputs. The most interesting aspect to this card is the use of upgradeable OPAMPs. These Operational Amplifiers are of good quality as is, but the user has the ability to upgrade these units. The upgraded OPAMPs provide for increased gain and a higher signal to noise ratio. Now, these OPAMP upgrades are only really useful for analog in/out. So, if the user decides to only utilize the DD 5.1 encoding, upgrading the OPAMPs will achieve nothing. If high quality microphone or analog-in work is being done, then the user may in fact benefit from higher quality OPAMPs. Many different OPAMPs can be used, but BlueGears recommends the Texas Instruments OPA2134PA or the OPA2604PA for use with the X-Mystique. These can be purchased directly from Digi-Key (www.digikey.com). A separate daughter card can be purchased that gives the user a comprehensive set of digital inputs. The HDA X-10 Expansion board is currently very hard to find. No word on availability has been posted as of yet for US customers. The X-Mystique 7.1 is surprisingly light considering all of the components on it. When I first saw it I thought it would be as heavy as some graphics cards, but in fact it is still very light. It is a PCI 2.2 compliant card, and it works with a variety of chipsets without a problem. It came packaged in a nice box with appealing graphics, and was fairly well protected by the anti-static bag and the cardboard slot it nestled in. The bundle includes a manual, driver disk, digital optical drive to sound card cable, and a good quality optical cable. No games or DVD-Playback software are included.
No games or other applications are bundled, but it is still a solid product out of the box. The optical cable included is quite thick and of good quality. There is also a CD/DVD digital internal cable included in the bag. The drivers on the disk are very old, and they have some real issues with many applications. Blue Gears does provide a newer driver for Windows 32 bit that are dated June 7, 2005. They also provide a brand new driver for Windows 64 bit that were released in late November. Blue Gears is expecting to see a new revision of the 32 bit drivers before this spring, and they expect better performance and compatibility with this latest set. Sound Quality All of my testing is subjective, as I personally appreciate how sound “feels” rather than how a scope graphs performance. With PC’s becoming the center of the multimedia home, sound becomes even more important once the PC is connected to a high quality receiver and speakers. Throughout the last decade it has been widely suggested that the speakers and the source material are more important than the equipment in between. We now are getting to the point where that is no longer the case. When the PC user can purchase an excellent set of speakers for less than $250 US, as well as play back DVD-Audio and other lossless audio formats, the bits in between start to make a big difference. Music Depending on usage, the majority of work a soundcard does is reproducing music. MP3’s, CD’s, and now DVD-Audio are all well represented in daily use for computer sound. I tested several different music types using both the analog and DDL ports on the soundcard. The analog sound in music reproduction was very good, but it did not have the same degree of clarity as the analog outputs of the Audigy 2 ZS that previously inhabited the test computer. There was something very subtle about the difference between the two cards, and the sound reproduction was just not as vibrant. This does not mean that the sound is bad, which is not true at all. The differences are minimal, and if a person didn’t have another soundcard they could switch back and forth to hear the differences, then they could happily go on through life feeling that they have the best quality sound out there. Again, the difference is subtle, but when listening to a high quality audio sample, the Creative card just is a bit cleaner and more vibrant. When using DDL the situation changes dramatically. Music comes across as much cleaner, and it has an added depth that is slightly better than the Creative analog output. The Dolby Digital Encoding is very well done with music, and it is very hard to discern any of the loss caused by the encoding process. For pure music listening pleasure, the stereo PCM settings are the best choice. If the user’s equipment can handle receiving a 96 KHz PCM, then for music that is probably the best solution. Dolby Digital is not a lossless encoding technique, and there are many out there that believe (and rightly so) that music played in DD 5.1 loses a lot of its warmth and transparency. Using the PCM stream, music sounded about as good as possible. This was far cleaner and clearer than the analog outputs of both the X-Mystique and the Creative Audigy 2 ZS. I believe the issue here with the analog outputs is the lack of higher quality OPAMPS. This can be quickly remedied though by purchasing the above mentioned higher quality OPAMPS for this card. This does add another $15 to $35 for another full set of OPAMPS, but to some users it might very well be worth it. Overall the X-Mystique does very well with music reproduction in both DDL and analog outputs, but it is not perfect. Upgrading the OPAMPS will probably improve the analog outputs, but there is no way to make DDL a more lossless audio encoding process. Luckily PCM audio is there to save the day. I did also test the card with a pair of Grado SR-125’s and the results were a lot more positive than with a standalone speaker system. The X-Mystique was able to drive these headphones very well, and is nearly identical to the Creative Audigy 2 ZS in overall sound quality. This card can drive headphones like the Grado’s without much problem, and the results are more than satisfactory. Movies 5.1 reproduction of movie content with both analog and digital outputs was flawless. Because so much is often going on in movies, audio quality does not need to be as precise as for music. Windows Media Player with the NVIDIA DVD decoder and PowerDVD 6.0 were used for testing. Both analog and digital outputs on this card produced excellent results. Soundtracks were clean, precise, and in-synch with the scenes played. Everything seemed balanced, and I could hear no real issues with this soundcard in movie situations.
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Copyright 1999-2005 PenStar Systems, LLC. |
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