Drivers

Control panels and stability

The Revolution 7.1’s drivers are very well implemented, with all the necessary features in one control panel applet. All settings ranging from speaker setup to bass management to surround field selections are accessible. The control applet itself is very well designed with a very clean and user friendly interface. As for the drivers themselves, system stability was never an issue. We tested the Revolution on three different types of systems: the venerable KT133A system, an AMD 760MP (dual Athlon) system, and an Intel i845PE system. All systems performed flawlessly without hiccups. We tested using the latest drivers (5.10.00.35 at the time of review) off of M-Audio’s website because the ones included on the driver disc were quite buggy.

Speaker Setup menu

Plethora of speakers already pre-loaded

Tweaking the speaker settings

On first load, you’re greeted with a panel where speaker adjustments can be made. M-Audio has implemented an extensive list of pre-defined speaker configurations from a large host of known speaker systems from various companies. If you own a system from one of the many popular companies such as: Altec Lansing, Klipsch, Cambridge Soundworks, Creative Labs, Logitech, Harmon Kardon, JBL, and more, you’ll likely find your set defined. Selecting the set you own will automatically configure speaker sizes, crossovers and the number of output channels. This is a very handy feature for those who are uncertain of the system they own. Of course, if you’re connected to more advanced systems, like a separate HT receiver, you can configure everything manually.

Output Mixer menu

Surround Sound menu

Input/Other menu

The Revolution mixer allows adjustments of all output channels individually and allows you to instantly play only one channel by selecting solo. One area we feel where the Revolution is lacking is in the area of selective recording: there are only two recording inputs and there’s no option to record any of the output channels, wave out, MIDI synthesis out, CD digital or the useful “What You Hear”, which records all outputs at once through the wave output mixer. We hope this is simply on the driver level and can be implemented with an updated driver release from M-Audio.

Tweaking volumes

Surround Sound modes

The Revolution 7.1 comes with Circle Surround II, which makes use of a mutli-channel speaker system to expand any audio signal into the highest possible multi-channel configuration you are using. You’re basically given two useful modes (mono is included which just simply outputs the same signal to all available channels): Cinema and Music. During our testing, the Music mode sounded a lot clearer, wider, and much warmer than the Cinema mode, which actually sounded muffled and behind doors. Music worked for both movies and music and worked extremely well. So well in fact we left it on for just about everything we listened to.

Also available are two specialty features called SRS Dialog Clarity and SRS TruBass. Dialog Clarity enhances the frequency range where the typical human voice is located and emphasizes that range through the center channel. We found that this feature worked really well for stereo-only movies. Multi-channel movies usually already locate spoken dialog in the center channel. On regular audio, Dialog Clarity also worked very well, allowing us to hear the very small nuances in speech that we couldn’t hear so well with the feature disabled.

For those who want to enhance their low-range experience, SRS TruBass gives emphasis to frequencies from about 150Hz and lower but does give extra punch to frequencies 40Hz and lower. This feature adds more life to tracks that lack on the low end, but with more recent music, SRS TruBass works best at the half setting or lower, otherwise, bass just becomes a little too boomy at times. (This area though, largely depends on personal tastes so you’ll have to play around with these features to find out exactly what satisfies your ears.)

One must note that SRS CS II only supports a maximum sampling rate of 48kHz. If you playback audio files with a higher sampling rate, CS II will not function and you will only get 2-channel stereo output. Processing and DA will still be 192kHz but will only be two channels. We find this quite interesting because with CS II enabled, the Revolution 7.1 thus becomes a 48kHz sound card instead of a full 192kHz device.