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Features Galore

The sound card supports a large array of features including preset EQ settings, a very customizable equalizer (from which you can make your own saved profiles), and reverb effects. There are 7 EQ presets and you can also modify the EQ to your own taste.

Angled View of the Santa Cruz

The reverb options for this card are SUPERB. As with the EQ settings, all changes in the control panel are live and take place in real time. You can apply 2 different effects at a time, and each of those effects can be panned left or right (and back and forth if you are using a 4+ speaker setup). Each of those effects can also be fine tuned individually for different sources. The fact that the effects can be applied to multiple sources is similar to the excellent ambient/environmental controls offered by Creative’s EAX control panels (which have even more extensive tweak capabilities) and the Philips Acoustic Edge (fewer tweak capabilities) panel, though the Santa Cruz’s ability to fade the effects forward/backward and left/right is completely unique. The customization is extremely detail oriented, it can take you hours to find various different combinations of EQ settings paired with your favourite reverb effects.

The main tab of the control panel allows you to set up the configuration of the sound card. A graphical representation of the rear connectors is labeled based on your settings, so that you have at a glance confirmation of what each jack is configured to do.

The final touch on the control panel is the profiles feature. You can save all of your settings under different profiles, which you can then apply at a moment’s notice. Every feature in the control panel, including your speaker config, the EQ setting, and the reverb effects are saved under the profile, so you can easily set up different profiles for games, for movies, for 2 speaker music, 4 speaker music, concert like effects… and the list goes on. As you can see, the control panel is a very neat utility that add a lot of value to the card.

Quality and Performance Considerations

With all the effects and EQ settings that you can apply to the sound streams, a main concern becomes both quality and performance. Because the 4630DSP handles EQ manipulation in hardware, the boost is of higher quality than what you would get in software only EQ. Compared to say, for example the EQ settings in your favourite MP3 player, there is no sign of distortion when you crank each of the EQ tabs. The quality of reverb effects is also better than software based reverb effects, but the difference is not so obvious. Some people have been reporting a hit in their CPU usage when they turn on one or both of the reverb effects. My own tests on an Athlon 850 find just the opposite – reverb effects do not take any added CPU usage, though EQ changes certainly add around 4-6% usage.

I think one of the big selling points of the card is the MP3 acceleration. Unfortunately, the acceleration ONLY APPLIES when using either the included AudioStation 4 or Microsoft’s MediaPlayer version 6.4. AudioStation4 itself is a fairly good media player, but MediaPlayer is not only buggy and annoying to use, it lacks features found on even the earliest versions of Sonique and Winamp. MP3 acceleration itself is not as juicy a feature as you would think, considering that most of today’s current day CPU’s are so powerful that the acceleration is NOT noticeable. Also, since most games do not use MP3 based music, MP3 acceleration will not affect gaming performance, and in a Windows environment what acceleration it does offer will largely go unnoticed, being that the CPU is not under constantly load during regular work. But just because I was curious, I compared the actual load that MP3 decoding can add when you start stacking the number of streams being decoded. When decoding a single song, the CPU usage was identical whether I used AudioStation4 (with acceleration) or Sonique (which the Santa Cruz cannot accelerate). However, as I started to decode more and more streams, the CPU became heavily loaded under Sonique compared to a similar test using AudioStation4. We’re talking about a 43% load with Sonique versus a 15% load using AudioStation4 when no fewer than 6 streams were decoding simultaneously. So in effect the MP3 acceleration WORKS, but it isn’t going to make any real world difference under regular windows usage.

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