Well I went ahead and bout a Revo 7.1 card, installed it the other day and connected my Senn HD590 to it. My impressions:
Does this card give better sound quality than my old Audigy 1? Yes. Wait, let me clarify that: Holy *bleep* yes.
The most significant difference from what I could tell was the new warmth and tightness in bass control. The Audigy was positively diarrhetic with its bass control, just distorted and crapping all over the sound stage. While the Audigy sounded brassy with its treble along with a significantly recessed midrange, the Revo did far better by giving off a smoother treble, and pushing the midrange more to the forefront, markedly better than the Audigy managed to do, which is important considering that a recessed midrange was one of the weaknesses of the HD590 headphones.
Line noise (with monitoring off) was virtually nil. Quiet as a mouse. The software bundle was a joke though. With the exception of WinDVD, I got a some weird Watersking game and a few other throw-ins. Lame.
However, it's also a plus, because simplicity can often be a beautful thing. While you can do a vanilla installation of Audigy with just the drivers, a full installation leaves you learning right away just how crappy Creative's software can be. The problem here is that people tend to realise this AFTER they installed all of Creative's moose droppings, and uninstalling it all can be one royal pain in the....
But anyhow, I was glad to see the reports of the M-Audio's superiority in sound clarity (at least over the Audigy 1) was not unfounded.
EXCEPT.....
I have a problem with the card. I also have an All In Wonder 8500DV ATI card with TV tuning, and much to my dismay, the M-Audio will not function worth a damn with the TV Tuner. When using the Init Wizard of ATI's MMC to try to detect the audio, it gives an error that forces me to use the "CD Player Audio" line. This results in no volume control over the TV Tuner, and the loss of ability to use TV on Demand (When it works you get the feared echos of two sound signals going at once). If you use the latest MMC update (9.1) TV on Demand simply crashes. You also have to manually switch on "monitoring" to get any kind of signal at all, but even with the signal input turned down, this results in line noise when the Line in is not in use.
As if to add insult to injury, when the M-Audio picks up sound from the TV Tuning, it clearly sounds better to that of the Audigy.
What pisses me off about this was that I researched beforehand to see if there were any issues between the card and TV tuning. I had read before that there was an issue similiar to the problem with Creative's Audigy line and ATI's TV tuning, but that M-Audio had produced a driver update to resolve those issues, so I thought I was in the clear. Wrong. The latest driver update didn't do squat for me.
Finally, my requests for technical support from M-Audio are going ignored. Nice.
I'll probably be dumping the card on eBay, and replace it with an Audigy 2 ZS instead. Even though Creative's tech support and driver support ranks somewhere up there with terrorism on my "Things I Really REALLY hate" scale, the fact is because they pretty much dominate the market, they have a hordes of angry users that will basically bludgeon them into providing needed updates for their cards. That's why there's a clear line of drivers from Creative that will allow their Audigy cards to function with ATI's TV tuning.
That said, while I love the sound quality of the M-Audio, I'm extremely disappointed that their latest drivers did not resolve the issue, and that they have non-existent tech support. I might consider buying the Audigy 2 ZS in addition to the M-Audio for a 2 sound card solution, but what I'll probably do is install both cards, then see how they compare in quality. If the difference is not that marked, and the card functions without a hitch with the TV Tuning, it's off to eBay M-Audio goes. Then if I'm in the mood for really top notch quality, I could always add an EMU 1212m later on.
The sad thing is that as bad as Creative's tech support can be, you can actually TALK to somebody live or at least get a response (sooner or later). M-Audio's problem with tech support is that they have none. Unacceptable.
Maybe though, somebody here with an M-Audio Revo, ATI card and TV tuning could point me in the right direction if they managed to get their setup working? One can only hope!
Overall, I'd give the card 2 out of 5 stars for those with TV Tuners, and 4 out of 5 stars for the rest.
M-Audio Revolution 7.1 Impressions
More thoughts...
Linear Mode
