SoundMAX 4 audio and Sonic Focus

This motherboard has SoundMAX 4 audio onboard, which is touted as:

"..the industry's highest performance and most reliable and user-friendly PC audio solution based on Microsoft windows for business professionals, audiophiles, musicians, and gamers."

This is a direct quote from the documentation that came with the motherboard. Could the "based on Microsoft windows" part mean that linux isn't supported? Probably. Amongst the bundled software is "sonic focus 1.0" The documentation for this says "We think Sonic Focus is the best sounding PC audio technology since codecs were invented." It "enhances music, movie and game sound by analysing compressed audio streams in real time, then restoring and enriching audio back to its original performance qualities."

Now I cant let claims like this go unchallenged, so I dragged in my 1960s furguson amplifier and pair of 6" woofers. These speakers once got complaints about the noise from 5 doors down the street, so they are certainly not lacking power. I installed the software, and found that I had a setting for the music type, which included "rock concert" "jazz session" "theatre" and "night club". I chose rock concert as being the most suitable, since all my music is rock of some description. There was a setting for speaker size, and I set this to the biggest size. I clicked the button to turn on the audio enhancing technology, fired up winamp, and put on "99 red balloons" by goldfinger. The effect was like a deaf man with laryngitis singing along to a badly tuned transistor radio in the shower, while workmen dig up the street outside with pneumatic drills. It was a horrible cacophony that not even a slipknot fan would enjoy. The midrange was muddy and powerless, and the sound seemed to fluctuate in volume like a badly tuned radio. The guitars were muted, and power chords sounded gutless and weak. The bass buzzed horribly, so badly I thought my speaker cones would surely tear. The medium low sounds, such as the bass guitar parts, buzzed and hummed. The drum beats were like the crack of a gun, and couldn't have done my speakers any good. The high end was hollow and scratchy.

Turning sonic focus off was a great improvement, but the sound quality still wasn't as good as my creative soundblaster 64, and nothing like as good as the nForce 2 onboard sound. I looked through the driver options, and found a setting for "acoustic environment". The options included living room, cave, underwater, stone corridor, and quarry. Now contrary to my expectation, these settings did not compensate for these environments, but simulated them. This seems rather silly, as who wants their speakers to sound like they are in a cave? The default setting was usefully described as "generic". I changed this to "living room" and the sound quality increased rather, loosing a lot of the echoey muddy effect. There is also a setting to tailor the sound to your ears frequency response, and setting this to "adult" reduced the harshness of the high notes a little. I also found that the soundmax 4 distorted at high volumes, and turning my own amplifier right up, and the software one right down, helped sort this out. It took me half an hour of tweaking to get this system to sound as good as my creative soundblaster 64, and even then, the bass was not at all clear, and buzzed rather than rumbled. I tried plugging my behringer HPX 2000 headphones into my amp, which are good quality DJ headphones, with much better clarity than my speakers. Using the headphones just made the problems even more obvious though.

I had another bash at getting sonic focus to work, and found that moving the "deep bass" slider stopped the buzzing of the cone at low frequencies. Altering the other settings only reduced and increased the singing in the shower effect. No matter what I did, complex sounds like guitar riffs ended up distorted and muddy. Sonic focus would often pick out a sound and amplify it, but this was never the sound you wanted enhanced. Simple sounds like piano notes seemed louder, but guitar strumming became muddy and indistinct. The vocals were always terrible, no matter how many options I tweaked. They sounded hollow and echoey, just like singing in a shower. Power chords lost all their power, and the songs that normally send prickles down my spine were ruined. To give you some idea of how bad it was, I played "99 red balloons" with the default settings. This song has one verse sung in German, and the rest in English. I had to listen hard to tell which verse was the one in German.

According to the sheaf of advertising material I received, Sonic Focus inc. have received "Grammy, Platinum and Gold RIAA awards for their work in the recording industries and have received honours for their contributions to the computing and legal industries including distinguished service awards and fellowships from the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Bar Foundation."

I suggest these awards are for their sterling work in making MP3s sound terrible. I cant see the RIAA being happy about software that actually does enhance mp3 quality, can you? The advertising also includes a quote from the Grateful Dead's manager. I think this should tell you everything you need to know about this terrible piece of software.

To conclude this section on the Intel D865PERLs onboard audio, I am afraid that I must say that Sonic Focus isn't worth the CD it is burnt on, and the SoundMAX 4, far from being "the industry's highest performance" is merely average, and encumbered by too many driver options. You would expect better from Intel, and I cannot see how Sonic Focus got past the QA team.

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