There’s a fair choice of 7.1 channels sound cards – ones with three channels at the front, two at the side, two at the back and sub-bass - but few of those offer Dolby Digital Live (DDL), too.

DDL is Dolby Labs encoder technology, which is quick and smart enough to create a Dolby Digital signal from any standard sound source, in real time.

Feed in 5.1 analogue sound and you get digital output to play back through any Dolby Digital-enabled sound system. Yes, we did say 5.1 channels, as DDL doesn’t yet support 7.1 channel sound.

To put it another way, you can get 7.1 channels out of the Aureon’s four analogue stereo jack sockets, or 5.1 digital sound out of the optical S/PDIF socket, ready for your Dolby-enabled amp. What you can’t get is 7.1 channel, digital sound from this card.

The sound quality is crisp and clear, so much so you may start to hear sounds from a given track that you didn’t know were there before. It also compared very favourably with the 5.1-channel sound we heard from the sound chip on the system board of our test PC.

The supplied driver is easy to set up and use, so you can switch sound modes for music, movies or games. Just as well, as the set-up guide is near useless.

Beware, also, that there has been a problem with this card where switching from DDL to stereo sound output caused a Blue Screen of Death crash if a sound file was playing at the time.

Terratec says a new driver is nearly finished – it sent us a beta of it while we were testing the card. If you see this problem, you should download the new driver from www.terratec.co.uk.

Dolby Digital Live is a useful technology, as it means all sounds, from simple speech, through stereo music to 5.1 channel game or movie soundtracks can be routed to the same sound system. Whether it’s vital for a multi-channel sound card on a PC is less clear, though, and without it, there are plenty of other 7.1 channel cards around.

Also consider
Creative Audigy SE 7.1
£18
Creative’s EAX sound has CMSS for synthesising channels and loads of software.

Trust 7.1 Sound Expert 714dx  
£25
Has co-axial S/PDIF in and out and Dolby Digital, although not Live.