Terratec Aureon 7.1 sound card will fit in your bin

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Manufacturer: Terratec Aureon 7.1 PCI product page
Price: £30 Inc. VAT
Requirements: Windows 2000/XP, 256MB RAM, DirectX 9 or later

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THE BIG PROMISE of technology can sometimes turn out to have a less than lovely reality. Take the Terratec Aureon 7.1 PCI soundcard with Dolby Digital Live. It promises to give your games full surround sound through a suitable Dolby Digital amplifier using a single optical cable. The reality is that it will do that but only if you're willing to put up with seeing the blue-screen-of-death on a regular basis, amongst other things.

The Aureon 7.1 PCI is a new card, not to be confused with the Aureon 7.1 Space, Universe or Firewire. Its main claim to fame is that it has real-time Dolby Digital encoding. But even there the name is misleading. While the card is capable of 7.1 sound, that's only if you hook up four cables to it. There's no Dolby Digital EX 7.1 sound, only traditional Dolby Digital 5.1 when you use the optical out.

Sound Quality
The most important thing about any sound card is, of course, the sound. Plugging in the Terratec and installing the software, the first thing to try were some CDs. Air's Talkie Walkie, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Bizet's Carmen all sounded wonderful on direct digital from the discs.

This was something of a surprise. The test PC had been linked to the amplifier using an S/PDIF connection from an on-the-motherboard sound chip. It should have sounded exactly the same but the Terratec was far more transparent and open. Chalk up the one and only good point. From there everything was downhill.

The Blue Screen of Death
The next thing to try was a bit of gaming to have a listen to the Dolby Digital Live. The soundcard has a little control panel that allows you to switch back and forth from stereo to Dolby Digital. Unfortunately, it's like playing Russian Roulette. It worked the first time and Half-Life 2 sounded good. Putting a CD on afterwards showed a problem though.

If you have Dolby Digital Live switched on, the soundcard converts the signal into surround and it doesn't sound anything like as good as the original CD. So, a quick reach for the switch back to stereo and boom! Welcome to the blue screen of death. It turns out that if you have any sound playing at all and make the switch, you can wave goodbye to Windows.

The MP3 Killer
Some MP3s were lined up and sounded fine. Until a Skype chat message arrived with a 'ping'. All of a sudden the MP3 playing slowed to half speed. Stopping and starting Winamp fixed that until the next Skype chat message arrived and it went back to half speed again. A few more attempts showed it to be a real problem that wasn't going to go away.

The DVD Killer
You could be forgiven for thinking that a soundcard with built in Dolby Digital Live should at least work well with DVDs. It doesn't have to do any work, just take the data stream off the disc and pass it down the optical cable to the amplifier. Unfortunately, the Terratec couldn't even manage that. Playing DVDs, the sound would stutter for half a second every five seconds or so.

Conclusion
An email to Terratec provided an admission that they knew that the sound card had problems. What's scary is that the card managed to make it onto the shelves at all. These problems are almost certainly driver problems. Even a small amount of testing showed them up. Terratec said that a new driver should be available soon but that doesn't make up for the fact that this card shouldn't go into your system in its current state.

Within five hours of this card going into the test system, it had been taken out and thrown away. It just didn't seem fair to take it back as some poor sod would probably have been sold it as a box opened deal and not been able to get their money back. Avoid at any price. ?