Installation and Drivers

As clichéd as this may seem, "Installation was painless." I just physically installed the card, then pointed it to the CD when Windows asked for drivers. The default driver install adds five items to device manager: ESS Device Manager, ESS Multi-Device Enumerator, Canyon3D DOS Games/FM Devices, Canyon3D MPU401 Devices, and Canyon3D Wave / WaveTable Synthesis.

Configure this!

Much to my dismay, after the driver was installed and I rebooted, there was no configuration application. With 3D sound cards, it is de rigueur to provide a centralized interface for tweaking one's sound configuration. For example, we should be able to specify whether the audio is being played back using headphones, 2, 4, 4.1, or 5.1 speakers. Troubleshooting modes for DirectSound3D and DirectSound should also be provided, as well as any configuration of various MIDI effects. None of these options were provided in the beta driver we were provided, but this probably will be addressed before the product is released.

So, I was forced to enter System Properties, and manually select the Canyon3D driver. From here, I was able to select the patch size for my MIDI playback, enable DirectSound HW acceleration, and speaker selection. Finally, having the "Analog Playback Select" in the control panel is also troublesome as it specifies which analog source goes to the rear channels when positional audio is not being used.