No problems at all with video and audio files.

With games, you have to juggle sometimes with the Sensaura 3D option. I've seen some games that do 3D sound with Sensaura on (most of them). But some games (warcraft 3) I had to disable sensaura for 3D sound to work (and it is hardware Directsound btw).

Same if you play DVD's with surround. You have to set the number of speakers you are using (2, 4, or 5.1) but disable sensaura, as it will conflict with the decoder of the dvd player program.

But stuttering, never occured.

Thanks for the reply, however in a review of the Terratec DMX 6Fire that you can find over here: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/terratecdmx6fire/ they say towards the end of the article where they test the CPU load when playing games with this card: "A typical situation in games is simultaneous reproducing of 8 to 16 voices. The Audigy advantage is a couple of percents. The Audigy outscores its competitor in stream mixing quality. With the Sensaura disabled the drivers of the DMX 6 fire card turn to the mode of software DirectSound algorithms. This is the mode which we recommend for playing music in universal WAV/MP3 players Windows Media Player and others using DirectSound API."

Now what do they mean by that?!! Why do they recommend to disable Sensaura for playing music with WAV/MP3 players like Windows Media Player?! I thought it was always best to turn Sensaura ON?! If it's best ON for games and OFF for windows media player, does that mean you have to change this settings all the time or what?!!

Anybody can please clarify what they mean, cause it's really confusing me? Thanks in advance!

Last edited by Dance123 on Oct-15-2003 at 02:28

Basically you can leave Sensaura on all the time, except if you wanna watch to surround DVD's or do heavy music production (where you need small latency Asio/WDM/GSIF.

The thing is, the Terratec has hardware acceleration, but Sensaura is an extra software layer to emulate EAX1/2 (not HD yet) and A3D protocols. Audigy have EAX "hardwired" in the card (hey, it's their protocol!). So you won't notice a difference in sound if you listen to MP3/WAV players like Media Player or Winamp if you turn your Sensaura on or off. It's just because Sensaura is an extra software layer, that you'll need some percent of CPU more (it's not fully reverting to Software mode really). Some percentage, nothing to really worry about.

In fact the DMX and the Audigy are aimed at different people.

If you are a hardcore gamer that wants to make music on the side, go for the audigy by all means.
For the DMX it's the opposite. If you want to make music, but still want to have some decent "consumer" support like games and discrete surround (besides the digital stream), the DMX6fire is better. Much cleaner sounding, much better latency. Games are secondary.