Software: A Supporting Agent.

Ad

Philips brings its sound card to life with Sound Agent 2. Though the Aurilium can run with Windows drivers, if you want to get the most from it, you have to install this program and its specific drivers. Sound Agent is a multifunction program with the usual functions like mixing and level control, choice of configuration and output level control, but also other well known ones (like the 10 band equalizer) or lesser known, such as normalization (level equalizing), 3D processing, acoustic atmospherics and correctors called QSizzle and Qrumble, the first acting dynamically in the low range and the second in the mid and high ranges. We were not especially impressed by the effects and correctors. If your recording is good and your equipment adequate, they just spoil the result. So only to be used when desperate... What is worse, some useful features like the equalizer do not keep their promises: bothered by resonance at 40Hz, we wanted to control it with the equalizer. The result was not conclusive. Puzzled, we ran a spectrum analyzer and found that the 32Hz setting worked more around 55Hz, and so did the 62Hz setting. This does not inspire confidence.

Unconvincing Performance

With 24 bit converters, you'd expect the Aurilium to perform better than average. But we were disappointed, because it often did less well than 16 bit models. Notably with a noise level much higher than the others we review here. Its performance is quite adequate for multimedia and play but, for recording, a different model would do a lot better. This makes us wonder about the worth of a 24 bit model: the Aurilium, for the time being, cannot play DVD audio, and applications requiring more than 16 bits/24kHz are very thin on the ground...


Talkback
Be the first to comment on this review!

Note You are going to post a comment as anonymous.



  •
Submit my comment
Google Ads