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Introduction

Maxi Sound Muse Boxshot

The sound card market has been going through some interesting changes, the foremost of which is the introduction of new players in a market that is primarily dominated by Creative Labs. When Aureal came about with their Vortex chip, literally a dozen companies started to produce quality sound cards that became truly viable and competitive alternatives to the Sound Blaster line of cards. With the sad demise of Aureal, the market has quieted down somewhat, but some strong leaders like Diamond Multimedia and Turtle Beach have since released new sound cards based on other chips. Guillemot is not a “bad boy” of the audio industry, but they have been shipping respectable sound cards in the form of their popular Maxi Sound Fortissimo card, and their powerful higher-end Maxi Studio ISIS XL card. The Maxi Sound MUSE is the latest in their sound card line up, and tries to target the budget end market with its aggressive pricing and bundle.

Just because Aureal is effectively dead, doesn’t mean that their A3D API has bit the dust, and this is very apparent in recently released games that still support this great API. On the hardware side, A3D has become as much of a standard as EAX, so it is no surprise that the Maxi Sound MUSE supports both EAX1.0 and A3D 1.0, in addition to the requisite DirectSound 3D support. The Maxi Sound MUSE is based around the CMI 8738 audio chip, by C-Media Electronics. The CMI8738 is a popular chip used by many OEM manufacturers for add-in sound cards and motherboard integrated audio. The chip provides C3DX 3D extensions to standard HRTF 3D positional audio, which C-Media claims enhances positional audio quality and reduces the “sweet” spot problems associated with HRTF based 3d audio.

Performance

Maxi Sound Muse Boxshot

Sound performance wise, the sound card had no trouble in games or audio applications. Sound was relatively clean and compatibility issues did not arise. Guillemot doesn’t publish any SNR ratings but I would hazard it is close to what other sound cards in this price range have. It certainly isn’t as impressive as the output from my Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla (rated at 97db), but the sound in all the newest titles game out clear and concise. We paired the MUSE with our Boston Acoustics BA4800s and had a blast in anything ranging from flight sims to first person shooters.

Aureal spent a lot of time protecting their A3D technology with claims that only true, A3D certified hardware could run A3D enabled games properly. I’m not sure if the CMI-8738 chip is Aureal certified (I doubt it, but nowadays Aureal isn’t certifying much, since they’re bankrupt and just got purchased by Creative!), but we had no problems running all of our latest games. This is definitely a simple, and cost effective way to jump into 4 speaker, A3D 1.0 and EAX 1.0 gaming.

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