Posted: September 9th, 2001
Written by: Tuan "GT2k" Huynh

Winamp

Winamp has become the most popular free MP3 player on the market right now; it offers low CPU utilization and great audio quality output. Today for our Winamp test, everything will be totally subjective and tested using various MP3’s I have in my list encoded at 192kbps and up.

Listening to MP3’s was enjoyable and provided a rewarding experience. Like I stated above, the Fortissimo II uses a similar DSP as the Game Theater XP so therefore the audio quality is similar. With the speaker setting in 4-Speaker mode, the Fortissimo outputs Stereo x2, or outputting the same audio signals to the rear channel. Overall everything worked great, no problems such as MP3’s skipping, and sound quality was very good sounding as good if not better then the SB Live.

Power DVD 3.0

If you are going to watch DVD movies with the Fortissimo II, you either are using a set of either 2.1 or 4.1 speaker system, or have your computer connected to some sort of component that has optical input whether it’d be a Dolby Digital Receiver or Dolby Digital speakers such as Altec’s ADA890’s. For testing purposes I tried both optical output as well as analog output for movies. Testing was done using the “Ultimate DVD Platinum” using the “Neo” Dolby Digital Demo.

First off for DVD testing is the Optical output. Optical S/PIDF worked fine in Power DVD when connected to my Altec Lansing ADA890’s, the speakers were able to pick up the signal and decode it correctly. The Audio quality was very good with no background noise interfering with the output.

One annoyance with the Fortissimo II was choosing the options in the drivers. When I wanted to change the S/PIDF output so it would work in Power DVD, it required a restart which becomes annoying because you had to restart to switch it back to Main outputs. I’ve checked to see if this happens in Windows ME and it appears that it is a Windows 2000 issue (special thanks to James at SoundCardCentral for verifying my results in Windows ME), but nonetheless AC-3 pass-through works, SB Live owners rejoice!

For those of you who don’t have a digital input source, lets move onto the analog output results. For analog audio testing, the ADA890’s were set to “Quad” mode to receive input from the analog source.

Using the Fortissimo II in analog mode provided a pretty good DVD watching environment considering it’s a 4 channel output card. Everything sounded good, and surround sound transitional effects were good. Nonetheless the if you are only going to watch an occasional movie, the Fortissimo II coupled with a set of 4.1 speakers should suite you well.

Gaming Performance

For gaming performance subjective tests, I used two of the most popular online games; Unreal Tournament and Half Life: Counter Strike. Half Life and Unreal Tournament were used because they feature some of the best implementations of 3D Audio in a game.

In Counter-Strike I just hopped on the SoundCardCentral/Rage3D/Hytek dedicated CS server and grabbed a few people and started playing. After playing for Counter-Strike I was impressed with the Sensaura EAX implementation. It took a few minutes to get used to sound coming from specific directions and pinpointing where people are. After getting used to the 3D sounds finding your opponents become easier to the point where using a 4 speaker setup is almost like cheating. Using the 4 speaker setup, I was easily able to find out where my opponents were and shoot a few rounds in them.

Unreal Tournament was pretty much like Counter-Strike. I just hopped on a random server and started shooting randomly at the other team members. With 3D Sound on I could hear rockets fly right past me and blow me up. If you are still playing UT without a 3D audio setup, you should definitely take a look at this card.

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