A typical card that lacks a hardware-based synth
Written: Mar 11 '02 (Updated Jul 31 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Clean sound, great bundled software
Cons: No hardware wavetable, and it could have a few more connectors.
The Bottom Line: Hardware is cheap, maybe flakey and unstable. It may be that mine was defective, but this card sounded a lot better when I first bought it.
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| darksentinel's Full Review: Guillemot Hercules Gamesurround Muse XL Sound Card |
The Hercules Gamesurround Muse XL is a decent 16-bit sound card, reminiscent of the SoundBlaster 16. It has no hardware synthesizer and relies on a software synthesizer to play MIDI sounds. I’ll explain why that’s important later.
"Gamesurround?" What’s with all this game crap I’m bumping up against lately? Frankly, I don’t know. My computer’s sound card and video card have never failed to play a game to its fullest. You’d think that sound card manufacturers would market their cards with names like Crystal Clear or Symphony. Nope. You’re guaranteed your games will sound okay. Whoopdeedoo.
The reason I purchased this sound card was to replace a sound card destroyed by a huge power surge. I regret the purchase only because of this Hercules card’s major weakness: The lack of a hardware synthesizer.
This soundcard works fine in that is sounds clean. It’s kind of difficult to make a noisy sound card though I have owned them. The second big test is sampling ability (recording). This card supports all the important recording modes up to 16 bit 48 KHZ stereo.
The back of the box hypes the card’s many abilities, which are actually standard software compatibilities. It’s sort of like hyping that a VCR supports VHF and CABLE. To look at the box, you’d think its sound were magical.
The sound card is a real value at $29 though, and it comes with a free headphone/mic set so you can fulfill your lifelong dream of looking like a telemarketer while you compute. The headphones are packaged I imagine to demo the game commander (voice command) software which is bundled.
The card also comes with PowerDVD, a nice media player.
The lack of a hardware wavetable means you’ll have to use a software synthesizer to play MIDI files. This is fine for playing MIDI unless you’re using software that tries to synchronize MIDI with WAVE playback. Software synthesizers have a delay because it takes time to generate the sound. On my 1000 MHz machine, the delay is noticeable.
Instead of coming up with possibly crappy software wavetable synthesizer, the card comes with Yamaha’s excellent XG soft synthesizer. The only advantages to a software synthesizer are that they pretty much sound the same on any card, and that they literally sound like a million bucks.
Sound card MIDI doesn’t sound professional. It sounds somewhere between a cheap Casio keyboard and professional. The Yamaha XG SoftSynth sounds like a warm synth that I wish I had in my studio. Your MIDI files will sound better played through the Yamaha XG SoftSynth.
The hardware wavetable disappointment: I’m a musician. Don’t believe me? Check out www.mp3.com/rj/ and hear all the music I WOULDN’T have been able to compose if I had used this card. Why? Well because of the software synthesizer. Since there’s a delay involved, it’s confusing to play a keyboard live, and nearly impossible to play along with previously recorded tracks.
It’s like pressing a note and only hearing a quarter-second echo later. If you compose using notation, like Beethoven, you won’t notice. If you use a MIDI keyboard like me, you’ll hate it. I have MIDI keyboards that play back instantly, so I can still compose, but sometimes I like to include the soundcard in the mix to make it that much richer. Can’t do that when the software synth is a quarter second or so behind the outboard synths and the digital audio tracks.
I will however, convert and record some songs for use with the Yamaha synth and record them for integration into other songs.
Speaking of recording, this card is indeed full duplex. The card can record its playback, and you can also record the all or part of the system mixer by pulling up the record properties and muting/un-muting various inputs. My SoundBlaster Live only allows recording from one input at a time, and there is no option for a “system mixer.” This makes this card better suited for recording a mixdown performance, which will include wave tracks as well as input from my Roland and Yamaha keyboards mixed in.
For instance, if you're using ACID 3.0, which can now include MIDI tracks with the wave tracks, the MIDI tracks will lag a quarter second or more behind. Theoretically, you can delay all the wave tracks and synchronize them, but it would be a hairy proposition.
I do use the CD in and AUX in internal pins for my Roland and Yamaha connections so that I can control their levels independently. The stereo input from my Digitech harmonizer processor goes into the LINE IN jack in the back. Sadly there are missing internal connectors for LINE IN, TAD, MIC and/or MODEM, which I could use for other stereo instruments even though some of those inputs aren’t traditionally stereo. Like I said, the card is lacking in some hardware. I see places on the card where pins should be, but someone decided to leave them off. Who knows? Hercules might have saved a dime or two. Woo Hoo!
The card also comes with a unique program called Storm, which is powerful loop-based music-making software. If you can figure out its wild machine-like interface, you can create unique high-quality music.
All in all, the card is sound. If I weren’t a MIDI musician, I’d be raving about it. It offers clean sound. True full duplex, and it even gave me a backup headset and mic. Just don’t buy it if you’re a MIDI composer. If you compose with loop-based software, or don’t compose MIDI at all, don’t hesitate to buy it.
Addendum: Toward the end of this card's tenure in my computer, I noticed that the sound was a bit low, not that it was ALWAYS low, but that it had CHANGED (read deteriorated). I was turning up my stereo so high that I heard more and more hiss. Also the live recording came with more and more noise, more of a squeal. If you're a professional musician or sound technician, you can't use this card.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 29
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Epinions.com ID:
darksentinel
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Location: Shreveport, LA
Reviews written: 29
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
I arrived on earth, ten blocks from then toddler, Michael Jackson. He's somehow eclipsed me.
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