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BlueGears b-Enspirer Sound CardDescription: BlueGears's b-Enspirer sound card sports a red PCB board with a gold expansion slot bracket. The card has six analog audio ports (Front Out, Rear Out, Center/LFE, Alt Center, Mic In, and Line In) which are all color coated and engraved. The card's two digital Toslink optical ports (S/PDIF In and Out) are each covered with a plug. The card also features two internal input connections – a 4-pin CD IN and an unlabeled 4-pin AUX IN.
Included with the b-Enspirer sound card is a single Toslink optical cable, an Owners Manual, and a Driver/Application CD.
Capabilities: As mentioned in the introduction, the core of the BlueGears b-Enspirer sound card is the C-Media Oxygen HD CMI8788 PCI chipset. This chipset features all of the functions found in C-Media's lower end chip sets (which are used in cards such as the HDA X-Mystique and X-Plosion). These features include Dolby Digital Live and DTS Interactive which can encode a two or more channel audio signal into a DD or DTS bit stream, respectively, for single cable 5.1 channel audio hookups to a home theater receiver. Other features adapted from the earlier chip sets include analog speaker support of up to 7.1 channels and support for a handful of surround sound APIs such including CRL3D HRTF 3D, A3D 1.0, Direct Sound 3D SW, Xgear3D, and EAX 1.0 and 2.0.
What the Oxygen HD chipset brings to the table, that previous C-Media chip sets do not, is the ability to output at the high resolution of 24bit/192kHz for not just 2 channel outputs but also 7.1 channel outputs (and number of channels in between). For surround sound output, that is twice the highest sampling rate of any other sound card out there (not powered by the Oxygen HD of course)! Furthermore, it does this with a SNR (Sound to Noise Ratio) of over 110dB. Another discrete feature offered by the card is two channels of 24-bit/96 kHz audio input for high quality recordings. Other new features associated with the Oxygen HD chipset are software related and will be discussed in the following section.
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