With the increased popularity of small form factor (SFF) computers for home theater applications, audio upgrade solutions that don’t occupy the machine’s sole PCI slot are of considerable interest.  In today’s review we take a look at an external USB sound card from M-Audio that promises 24-bit/96kHz playback and 7.1 surround sound - the Sonica Theater.

The Sonica Theater will draw obvious comparisons to Creative Lab’s Extigy USB sound solution, which we reviewed earlier this year.  However, the similarities are only superficial and we shall find that the Sonica Theater is quite a different animal.  Like the Extigy, however, the Sonica Theater is a USB 1.1 based solution that connects to your SFF or laptop via a USB cable and provides surround-sound outputs for connection to a set of powered speakers.

M-Audio Company Background

M-Audio is a relative newcomer to the world of consumer audio, only launching its consumer audio division at the end of 2001.  However, the company’s history is far longer than that, being founded back in 1988 (under the name Midiman Inc.) with the goal of offering complete audio solutions for recording artists and audio professionals.  When the consumer audio division was launched, their aim was to leverage their professional audio products to make high-end consumer audio products.

Conclusions

Conclusions

The M-Audio is an interesting product that should certainly be of interest to anyone wishing to upgrade the audio in their home theater PC without occupying the PCI slot in their computer.  It has several attractive features which will endear it to many people.  These include its tiny size, lack of external power supply and high-quality 24-bit/96kHz recording and playback capabilities.  Home theater enthusiasts will be delighted by the support the SRS audio processing and impressed by the thundering bass and dialog clarity it brings to even low end speaker systems.

However, the story is not all good. 

The card is let down by its use of the aging USB 1.1 standard, which means that in most situations it is unable to fully exploit the quality audio components it includes.  Bandwidth restrictions mean that 24-bit/96kHz playback is actually only possible in stereo mode, and so in most home theater situations the system will be limited to 48kHz playback.  Although this may be fine in practice, it does somewhat dampen the claims of M-Audio to have the first truly 24-bit/96kHz system on the market.  Ironically, most stereo sources (such as audio CD's) only support 16-bit/44.1kHz anyway, and so the 24-bit/96kHz stereo capabilities of the card are likely to go unused.  This is sufficient for most current DVD movie soundtracks, but will prevent full support for DVD-Audio and DTS 96/24 sound tracks in the future.  One wonders why M-Audio didn't adopt the USB 2.0 standard which, while remaining backwards compatible with USB 1.1, would have allowed the card to deliver the full 24-bit/96kHz experience on all eight channels

The second serious fault with the card is its lack of any real support (in hardware or software) for even the oldest of gaming 3D-positional audio standards.  This is another glaring omission for a card aimed at the surround sound computer owner.  M-Audio suggest that SRS CS II can be used in conjunction with games to provide an immersive surround-sound experience, but this is a very poor second-best compared with actually supporting the de facto standards for 3D positional audio in gaming of A3D, EAX, EAX 2.0, EAX 3.0 and now EAX 4.0.  These standards not only allow game writers to precisely position sounds to match the action in their games (so that you hear the footsteps of a monster behind you, for instance) but also to model advanced environmental effects such as the different audio properties of the environment, different filter models for the environment, panning and morphing, and so on.  Synthetic surround created from the basic flat stereo source is no match for these technologies.

The M-Audio Sonica Theater has an MSRP of $130 but can be found for around $80 on the street.  Compare this with a typical price of around $125 for the Creative Labs Extigy and you can see that the Sonica Theater is an attractive alternative - providing you don't want the gaming support, remote control, hardware Dolby decoder or optical S/PDIF output of the Extigy.  It is also considerably smaller and more portable than the Extigy and does offer better audio quality with full 24-bit support even if the sample rates are often limited to 48kHz.  At the time of its launch, this was enough to differentiate the Sonica Theater from the Extigy and to create its own market niche.  However, Creative has recently launched the Audigy 2 NX USB-sound solution that uses the USB 2.0 standard and supports 7.1 audio as well as full EAX 3.0 support.  Unlike the Sonica Theater, the Audigy 2 NX promises full 24-bit/96kHz replay in 7.1 mode (once Microsoft updates its USB implementation later this year) - but comes at a price tag on the street of around $120.  We hope to provide you with a detailed review of this shortly, but on paper at least, this seems to knock the Sonica Theater back into second place.

The Sonica Theater, then, remains the cheapest external solution for upgrading your SFF or laptop to glorious 24-bit surround sound.  At around $80 it is around 30% cheaper than both the Creative Extigy and new Creative Audigy 2 NX products.  However, you get what you pay for, and the lower cost results in poor gaming support and only limited 24-bit/96kHz replay.  That said, it offers excellent sound quality and excellent surround processing thanks to its support for SRS Circle Surround II, and so is certainly well worth consideration if you want great home theater sound for minimum investment.

The Sonica Theater supports Windows Me, 2000 and XP and Max OS 9.2.2 or later and Mac OS X 10.1.5 or later.  It comes with a one year limited warranty and is available for around $80.

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Sudhian Media would like to thank M-Audio for providing the Sonica Theater card used in this review.

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• Product Specifications and Package (1 of 5)
• Size, Connectors & Hardware (2 of 5)
• Audio Performance (3 of 5)
• Audio Control Panel (4 of 5)
• Conclusions (5 of 5)