Terratec's DMX 6fire 24/96

The next big thing in PC audio?
Terratec's DMX 6fire 24/96 is as close to audiophile-class equipment as I've ever come. The DMX 6fire 24/96 blurs the line between professional and enthusiast-level audio, and though the card has been available for some months, it's only now priced at a level that's at least comparable with Creative's high-end Audigy 2. Even with the discounted $250 price tag, the DMX 6fire 24/96 is more expensive than all the sound cards we're testing today put together. Let's find out if it's worth it.

For me, the Terratec DMX 6fire 24/96 is easily the most interesting card in this comparison because it uses ICEnsemble's Envy24 audio chip. VIA recently bought ICEnsemble and will be using variations on the Envy audio chip in everything from integrated motherboards its Eden small form-factor digital media platform. We'll be seeing a lot of different Envy flavors this year, and the DMX 6fire 24/96 should give us a good idea of what we can expect from VIA's new audio offerings. Fortunately, many of those new Envy24 flavors won't be bringing along the DMX 6fire 24/96's hefty price tag.

The DMX 6fire 24/96 card is less crowded than even the Audigy's. Just because this audio card is expensive doesn't mean that its board layout has to be a complicated mess of components, connectors, and circuitry. $250 won't buy you style, though. The DMX 6fire 24/96 comes on a not-so-lovely brown PCB that's sure to clash with at least a few of your PC's internal components. Don't audiophiles have a sense of visual style?

Terratec provides the usual two CD and single auxiliary inputs on the DMX 6fire 24/96. The inputs are all mounted flush with the board, so you shouldn't have to worry about bending any wires to accommodate adjacent PCI cards. There are also on-board connectors for a TTL CDROM digital audio input, the card's 5.25" bay insert, and Terratec's DigitalXtension and microWAVE PC synth hardware.

Running the show behind the scenes is ICEnsemble's Envy24, which provides the true 24-bit/96kHz audio processing that the DMX 6fire 24/96 name implies. Unlike the Audigy, the DMX 6fire 24/96 supports 24-bit/96kHz sampling rates from input to output with no drop in quality along the way. The board's AKM AK4524VF codec chips support 96kHz sampling rates with a full 24 bits of resolution.

If you're only listening to low-bit-rate audio recordings like 128K MP3s, the DMX 6fire 24/96's additional audio precision isn't going to do much for you. The DMX 6fire 24/96 will be able to accurately reproduce the sound of the original low-quality recording, but the card's peak 24/96 internal precision isn't going to be able to clean up the audio signal to make it sound any better. Garbage in, garbage out.

Support for 3D audio standards like EAX, A3D, and Sensaura makes the DMX 6fire 24/96 a capable gaming card if you're looking for a little more than just media playback. In-game audio samples generally aren't high-quality enough to take advantage of true 24/96 internal precision, but that could change in future games.

I've not talked about MIDI support much in this comparison, but it should be mentioned that the DMX 6fire 24/96 has no hardware MIDI support and only a simple software engine to handle MIDI. Terratec sells additional MIDI hardware which is meant to be used in conjunction with the DMX 6fire 24/96, so if you're looking for MIDI, be prepared to open your wallet more than once if you go with Terratec.

Terratec splits the DMX 6fire 24/96's various external I/O ports between the PCI back plate and an included 5.25" drive bay insert. There's really no other way for Terratec to include all theses port without using a 5.25" drive bay insert, but unless you're running one of Shuttle's small form factor PCs, you've probably got a drive bay to spare.

On the PCI back plate, the DMX 6fire 24/96 includes standard analog audio jacks to handle one of the card's input channels, and its front, rear, and center output channels. Plugging in the 5.25" drive bay insert gets you three RCA inputs, a microphone input with a gain adjustment knob, a headphone output with volume knob, coaxial and optical digital input and output ports, and MIDI input and output ports. What's more, the 5.25" drive bay insert is decked out with a silver face plate that should blend in quite nicely with those fancy aluminum cases.

Terratec bundles its own driver interface with the DMX 6fire 24/96 if you want to finely tune your audio settings, and the level of control you have over everything is quite astonishing. Heck, you can even change the color scheme of the driver control panel. One interesting quirk with the driver control panel is that, by default, surround sound is turned off. You actually have to dig through the control panel and re-enable surround sound to get any kind of 3D sound going in games. It's not hard to do, but it's a little annoying.

The DMX 6fire 24/96's software bundle includes a wide array of titles that speak to the card's pro-audio roots. In addition to a copy of Musicmatch Jukebox and a 6-channel version of PowerDVD, you also get a copy of Algorithmix's Sonic Laundry noise reduction tools, Steinberg's WaveLab Lite 2.0 audio editing package, and Emagic's MicroLogic FUN audio/MIDI sequencer. All in all, it's a unique bundle that should give audio enthusiasts looking beyond simple audio playback a few dabbling options.