Bluegears b-Enspirer

Damien Virulhapan is inspired to find an opponent to the Creative juggernaut.

Creative’s dominance in the sound card industry has left the market barren of competitors. When one has appeared, it has usually either decided it was a bad idea, or the company goes under very quickly, leaving Creative to gobble up both their products and intellectual property. The Bluegears b-Enspirer is the latest contestant to vie for Creative’s throne, and we hope it manages to stick around for a while.

Based on the popular C-Media Oxygen CMI8788 audio processor (also featured in hardware from Auzentech and Razer), the b-Enspirer supports a luscious 24bit/192kHz playback which should suit anyone’s needs.

The usual outputs are there for up to eight-channel sound, meaning headphone/front, side, centre/subwoofer, back, and S/PDIF are there for the plugging in. Inputs are also fairly standard, with mic-in, line-in and S/PDIF available. Those lucky buggers with 7.1 speaker setups can fully immerse themselves in audio bliss with the b-Enspirer installed in their system.

The b-Enspirer has all the Dolby and DTS format support one would need in a consumer level sound card, including Dolby Pro-Logic IIx and DTS Interactive, which cannot be found on the competing X-Fi XtremeMusic.

Despite the range of Dolby and DTS options, the b-Enspirer lacks support for EAX 3.0 and above. This is painful news for gamers looking for a competent Creative alternative, and the situation doesn’t look like it will improve – although EAX 2.0 is free, future revisions may require an unattractive licence fee. Oddly Bluegears is happy to pay the licence for Dolby, which either means the fee must be exorbitant indeed or it simply didn’t see EAX as necessary.

The main difference is that EAX 2.0 only supports a maximum of 32 voices compared with EAX 5.0, which can handle up to 128 voices. Obviously you’d need to find a game that uses EAX 5.0 for this to be of any benefit, and fortunately there aren’t too many out there at the moment.

The bundled drivers and software are a lot more respectful of your hard disk space than Creative’s alternative, coming in at a nifty 23MB post-installation compared with the 364MB of torment that the dominant sound company unleashes on your unwitting hard drive.

For those on Vista, Bluegears has been prepared for a while, offering beta drivers on its website. It will only be a matter of time before official drivers become available.

Once installed, the b-Enspirer control panel is cleanly laid out with tabs separating the sound card settings and effects. Of note are the Dolby and DTS settings, where speaker placement can be manually adjusted to suit your surround sound tastes. Bonus!

Running the b-Enspirer through RightMark’s 3DSound CPU Utilisation test garnered results of 0.0526 percent, 0.3186 percent, 0.4124 percent and 0.4488 percent (standard deviation) CPU utilisation using DirectSound 2D, DirectSound 3D hardware and DirectSound 3D hardware + EAX respectively when tested using 127 buffers. The X-Fi XtremeMusic’s results were 0.4516 percent, 0.5049 percent, 1.9526 percent and 2.2705 percent (standard deviation), meaning the b-Enspirer uses less CPU cycles to get the job done. This is valuable when gaming, as a lesser load on the CPU can mean higher FPS.

Putting our ears up to the speakers, the b-Enspirer brought excellent clarity and quality when listening to audio CDs. This is without the need for Dolby or DTS settings, which is good news for the audiophiles who like their sound un-bastardised, while at the same time pleasing those that want a special sound to their audio.

Despite the b-Enspirer’s lack of full EAX support playing Doom 3 was again very good, with the same clarity and quality found when playing back music. The surround sound was able pick up all the audio nuances, offering a smooth pan between channels.

The b-Enspirer is definitely an excellent alternative to Creative, offering features not found on its range of cards and delivering the sound quality to back it up. If you value every single CPU cycle, are after good quality sound and want to avoid the now-famous Creative crackle, snap this one up now. We can only hope the company manages to beat the curse, and stick around for a bit.