Sondigo Inferno 7.1 PCI Soundcard

Final thoughts

Obviously, listening to everything through a decent pair of speakers or headphones helps. There's no point on spending £50 on a 7.1 surround sound setup and £50 on a pair of headphones because the price per speaker will be £25 on the headphones and merely £6.25 on the 8 channel setup. You do get what you pay for and whilst you're splashing out $150 on an Inferno you have to consider what you've got to translate the audio to your ears. I was using a decent pair of headphones (Sennheizer HD215) for the testing but I also put it through some basic £10 "TEAC PowerMax" speakers and some £10 Sony in-ears. You can easily tell the quality difference the more you spend, even over that of the "geek pride" element that extenuates the "awesome" effect of any major purchase.

My PC uses an U160 SCSI card plugged into the PCI bus, on it is a 15k SCSI drive that holds my pagefile and "splash disk" for dumping large files, so it's almost constantly in use. This has a serious effect on my onboard audio as I can literally hear the PCI bus working. Despite the fact the AW8-MAX uses the special AudioMAX daughter board, there are still traces built into the motherboard that suffer from noise as the PCI traces are being used. Using a discrete PCI card, both the X-Fi and Inferno didn't suffer the problem of noise from the motherboard and there was no effect whilst nothing was being played.

For those of you who dislike Creative for any number of reasons; whether it be the poor driver support, lists of problems with older products or over hyped and non-delivering marketing then the Inferno is definitely the first card to consider. However, Creative does offer more in the way for gamers with Advanced EAX HD 3.0-5.0 over the Sondigo Inferno's basic 1.0 and 2.0 compatibility. Also, Creative offer a break out box and 5.25" bay panel for extra functionality in its more expensive models that I would like to see the Sondigo team replicate. This way there could be discrete left and right coaxial inputs/output, as well as coaxial S/PDIF support, as well as meatier 1/4" sockets and Midi inputs. All these are missing from the Inferno - meaning it translates into being just an expensive, but better quality, HD audio.

It is expensive at $150, and whilst audiophiles will naturally turn their nose up because it's "not a separate", having one of these in your HTPC would make it seriously kick some ass. If you enjoy music or movies and some games at your PC, and if you're the type to spend several hundred anyway on a graphics card/new CPU/motherboard/memory without a second thought, then consider the Inferno to complement it.

After using the card and directly compared it to an X-Fi my money would still go to the Inferno. It's well made, it works fantastically and is really intuitive to use despite the lack of break out box.