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Installation and Impressions

Test System:

Intel PIV 1.7 GHz
Abit TH7-II RAID
512M Samsung RDRAM
Maxtor 7200rpm ATA133 40Gb

Installing the MAYA 7.1 was relatively easy, except for one slight problem. I had a SB Audigy Platinum sound card installed and being all excited about installing the MAYA, I didn’t remove the Audigy software that was integrated into the Windows environment. When I plugged in the MAYA and booted up my computer, Windows was extremely unstable. So, I took out the MAYA card and uninstalled the Audigy software and reinstalled the MAYA and everything worked out. A little blunder on my part, but nothing more than a minor setback. ;-p

Now that everything works, let’s get to the fun part. I have a six-speaker sound system with TOS-Link optical, so I carried my computer within wire range (TOS-link is limited to three meters) and setup camp. I started up my computer, installed PowerDVD, and put in the The Matrix DVD. Other than the fact that I was watching a movie on a 15” screen, it was quite good. The sound was on par with my Toshiba DVD player - Sony A/V control center combo, which costs around $450 CAD. It is definitely a desktop home theatre card if I ever saw one. Check out the volume controls!!

Obviously, a PC is not normally used just for movies or else why wouldn’t I just spend the $450 for the Toshiba/Sony combo instead of $2000 for a computer, although I've seen some pretty crazy rigs with large LCD panels - drool. So I tried a few applications. Winamp played without a hitch and had a pretty nice quality. So I moved on to games. I started up Counter-Strike and right away, I noticed a buzz, which I have never heard before. I clicked on a menu item and the sound toned down a bit, but the buzz was still noticeable, so I clicked on another menu item again and the sound disappeared. I tried the menu clicking a couple of times and pretty much the same thing happened with the buzz coming and going randomly. The Sims worked without any sound artifacts, so I must assume that the problem was isolated to Counter-Strike. I think it must have to do with the sharp, high-pitched chirp the Counter-Strike menu makes. The game itself was okay, being only 2 channels, but there is no way for the MAYA to shine.

Conclusions

The MAYA 7.1 and MAYA7.1 Gold sound cards are nice alternatives to spending huge amounts of money for a DVD player and A/V control center. The MAYA 7.1 Gold sound card offers slight performance increases and includes the PowerDVD software bundle. The only problem I had was the Counter-Strike menu glitch, so I have to take that into account.

	Maya 7.1	Maya 7.1 Gold
Box Contents	75%	80%
Features	80%	82%
Sound Quality	78%	79%
Drivers	89%	89%
Compatibility	84%	84%
Value	88%	85%
Overall Score	82%	83%

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