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Recently we took a look at Creative’s Audigy 2 Notebook ZS which offered the functionality of Creative’s desktop sound card in a PC Card form factor. By contrast the Terratec Aureon 7.1 FireWire is an external soundcard device aimed at both the home musician and laptop gamers. While not as convenient as the Creative PC Card, an external box still enables laptop users to use a full-featured high-quality sound card with their laptop and to easily switch it between machines. An external box also has the benefit of removing the influence of electromagnetic noise from inside a PC, which helps make better sounding recordings.

The box itself is quite substantial, at roughly 5cm in height and 16cm in length. It’s most definitely not the most convenient of form factors if you move around a lot, but it does feel sturdy. Terratec earns itself brownie points trying to inject some personality into its design with each of the three volume knobs (or “potentiometers” as audio bods like to refer to them) illuminated by orange lights. The knobs have a jet turbine appearance, of the kind found in 1970s puppet adventure shows. It’s a shame that the mark on the dial indicating the position couldn’t have been made clearer. Obligatory blue LEDs indicate the input source.

While my Shuttle PC seemed happy to drive it without the power supply the manual states that this depends on the chipset used so to ensure stability it’s always safer to use the power supply.

The Aureon 7.1 Firewire has eight discrete audio outputs and offers a single stereo input. On the front are two quarter-inch jack sockets for headphones and microphone, whilst on the back the analogue connections are all of the RCA (phono) kind. This is worth noting as whilst home audio amplifiers often use these connections, many computer speakers use the mini-jack connection, of the kind often found on consumer PCI soundcards.

Installation was mostly straightforward, although not quite as described, possibly as a result of running Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. The software bundle includes Power DVD 5, the remote control application and Algorithmix audio restoration tools. Sensuara is included as the virtual 3D audio technology. Recently purchased by Creative Labs this is an effective but now fairly dated technique. The device supports EAX2 and hardware 3D buffers, but only if the Sensuara option is selected in the mixer control panel. When selected, 48Khz is the only accessible sample rate, which will mean alternative sample rates will have to be re-sampled in real-time up to 48Khz, a limitation that Creative soundcard owners will be familiar with.

It is as a home theatre surround option that the Aureon succeeds best although with some small reservations. Out of the box Dolby Digital and Dolby EX can be decoded using the supplied version of WinDVD. Given its obvious home theatre appeal, it’s a little disappointing that DTS isn’t included as a standard option particularly that the box is sold on the quality of its audio output. To get DTS, you have to upgrade your copy of WinDVD. There’s a remote control as well, which is a useful if you’re intending the Terratec to form the hub of your home theatre system.

As far as musicians are concerned though, the Terratec is something of an odd beast, indicating a lack of focus as to whom exactly the sound card is aimed at. On the plus side there’s a microphone preamp, ASIO driver support for up to eight discrete outputs and line and phono inputs with admirably low latency. I had no problems at the default 6ms. Yet there are some musician-centric features obviously missing, no doubt to differentiate it from Terratec’s sound card line aimed specifically at musicians. There’s only a single stereo input (the line, phono or optical connections cannot be used simultaneously) and there no phantom power for professional microphones that require a power supply.

Connections are via RCA sockets rather than balanced jack connections, used to reduce ground noise. There’s no MIDI however, which is a shame given how cheap it would have been to add. There’s no GigaStudio driver option (GSIF) and the restrictions placed on the device when the Sensuara option is selected mean constant switching when moving between games and music applications.

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