Introduction
Windows XP and my Soundblaster Live! didn't get along very well. The Soundblaster would come home drunk at 3am and wake Windows up, and then the two of them would get in a huge fight and throw potted plants at each other. I finally got sick of them fighting (and having to replace plants) so I kicked the Soundblaster out and was in search of a new room mate. I settled on the middle child in the Hercules soundcard line up, the Gamesurround Fortissimo 2. It's the midrange card between the entry level Gamesurround Muse XL and high-end Game Theater XP.
The Fortissimo is not a super high end sound card. If you are looking for an alternative to an Audigy Platinum, this isn’t the review you should be reading. However if you have an OEM computer with an old soundcard or are using a motherboard with just a 2 channel AC’97 codec, the Fortissimo would make an excellent upgrade, and a very inexpensive one to boot.
The card is based on the Cirrus Logic SoundFusion CS4624 digital signal processor. The chip supports 4 speakers with a 20-bit DAC and a mic and line-in with an 18-bit ADC. Sampling rates up to 48khz are supported. The card has Sensaura based 3D positional Audio with support for Microsoft DirectSound™ 3D, EAX™ 1.0, EAX™ 2.0 , A3D™ 1.0, I3DL2™, MacroFX™, MultiDrive™, ZoomFX™, EnvironmentFX™, and Dolby Surround™. Lets have a look at what you get.
The back panel is probably a little different than what you probably are used to seeing on a soundcard. The far left connector that looks like an S-video input is actually a Din connector that is used to connect the analog speaker connections, microphone, and headphones.
You can see the wire for these connections on top of the manual. The reason why it is laid out this way is there simply isn’t enough space on the back panel for all the possible connections, and rather than eat another expansion slot with a daughter card for the excess inputs, they are handled by a single wire. Very clever. Next to the Din connector is the line-in jack, followed by an optical digital in and output. Note that even though the card has digital connectors it is not a 5.1 channel sound card. Finally there is the traditional gameport. On top of the card are CD and Aux inputs, but no digital CD input. This is pretty common, I’ve noticed that there are very few soundcards with digital CD inputs, the Live\Audigy being the exception.
Interested? You can get your own Gamesurround Fortissimo 2 from Tekheads in the UK for GBP £33.04 or at various different retailers in the US for as low as USD $22.
