I put the install CD in my DVD drive and that was that. In other words, the driver installation was a snap. I have been using the card for while and have had no errors, crashes or freezes. There have been no in game or audio anomalies to speak of and the included drivers are rock solid. For those wondering, the Creative X-Fi drivers cannot be installed for this card. Once installed, the driver features a simple three panel control center for major audio task such as: Entertainment, Gaming and Audio Creation. Switching modes I found the drivers very easy to use and every control was easy to find. The lower left corner has a mode button to easily change for the task at hand. There is also a third party Mode Changer application that changes automatically based on the applications you choose using profiles for example if you load a game it will switch to game mode etc. Very handy and is compatible with a little modification. The drivers installed just as easily in Vista. There is a small Alchemy issue I will outline later. Below is the Audio creation panel, very familiar to a home recording user. This panel is laid out like an audio mixer easily mapping all input and outputs. There are also channel insert effects, AUX effects and Master Aux effects to use in your recordings. Included hardware effects are Auto Wah, Chorus, Compressor, Distortion, Flanger, Parametric Eq, Pitch Shifter and Vocal Morpher. This gives the home recording group many hardware effects to use on vocal tracks or to use live while tracking a instrument such as a electric guitar.

The panel below is Entertainment Mode and would be used for movies and music listening. You have controls for speaker selection X-fi CMSS 3D upmix technology, headphone technology. There are settings for the 24 bit Crystalizer which helps with making music more bright and punchy. There is SVM which is smart volume management which keeps rapid changes in volume levels in check. You also have a 10 preset, 10 band Graphic equalizer with overall Preamp control. There is also a master mixer for your cards inputs and digital settings. Timbre controls (Bass, Treble) are also easy to find.

This final panel is the Gaming mode control panel. You have controls for the X-fi CMSS3D Upmix and headphone technologies, the X-fi Crystalizer controls, Equalizer and mixer controls. The very bottom controls are speaker selection and bass redirection including a +15 decibel boost. These bass controls change when using speakers or headphones.

The same “Modal architecture” and overall drivers are present in Microsoft Vista. I found the overall panels easy to use and all controls are intuitive if you have experience using audio cards. All audio settings are independent of other panels so for instance if you turn on CMSS3D for gaming with headphones it will not remain enabled on the other panels. This is very nice feature. Drivers, of course are always evolving and Auzen will continually post new driver revision on their site. I should also note here that current ALchemy versions are not compatible with the Prelude. The site says it is being remedied and a new version for the Auzen Prelude will be available shortly. For those of you unfamiliar, Windows Vista does not have direct sound extensions and in turn needs EAX games to be modified with the ALchemy application to provide proper surround sound and gaming effects via the OpenAL API.