MAD DOG Entertainer 7.1 DSP Sound Card
8 Channels of Chest Pounding Sound

By Tom Laverriere
February 17, 2004

 
Installation and Software
Like Taking Candy From a Baby!

The installation instructions included with the MAD DOG Entertainer can't be called a manual because it's really just a simple insert, but nevertheless, all pertinent information is included.  Installation of the card is quite typical of any PCI device.  Locate an empty PCI slot on your motherboard and insert the card there.  After securing the card to the case with a screw, close up the case and power on the machine and install the drivers.  We are using Windows XP so a few seconds after the OS had finished loading a little note popped up in the system tray notifying us that XP had found a new piece of hardware.  Simply cancel out of that screen and launch the included driver CD.  A window will pop up with a few options.  Clicking on Setup will load the drivers for the card.  Once the drivers are loaded the system requires a reboot.  Once the machine is rebooted the installation is done.

  • Setup: Installs the drivers for the sound card
  • Register: Walkthrough of how to register your product
  • Manuals: Manuals in PDF format
  • DirectX: Installs the latest version of DirectX onto your machine
  • Warranty: Document stating the warranty coverage of the sound card

With the drivers installed, the system tray contained a new icon.  Clicking on it revealed the sound card's configuration panels.  You will notice that there are seven different tabs for the various output and input settings of the card.  Across the top of the screen, above the tabs are five icons that are used to set the speaker configuration.  As you can see we have chosen 6 speakers which is equal to 5.1 surround sound.  Once the speaker configuration is set, the appropriate controls are visible and adjustable on each tab.  Since we tested our speakers using an analog signal, the tabs related to a digital signal were grayed out and did not display any useful information.

Playback

Record


 


 

Speaker Configuration

Device Info

The Playback tab allows you to set the volume level of all the speakers you have connected to the system.  The Record tab allows you to set the volume of your recording device, and more importantly what input source you will be using when recording.  The Speaker Configuration tab tests each speaker individually, which comes in handy for a couple of different reasons.  One reason is to make sure each individual speaker is working and secondly to hear the volume of each speaker separately.  This is very useful for fine-tuning the overall sound of the system.  Finally, the Device Information tab simply displays the driver versions and some system information including OS and DirectX versions.  Overall, we found the sound card's control panels to be straightforward.  The average user should be able to have their speakers set up properly in a matter of minutes.  Now that the sound card is setup and ready to go, let's get to some performance numbers for the MAD DOG Entertainer DSP 7.1 sound card.
 

Performance & Benchmarks