Drivers

Being a Cmedia based sound card, the Devil HDX the supports the vendor customisable Cmedia Xear suite of software. You get all the glorious Xear effects features, including Surround, 3D positional audio, SingFX karaoke modes, and for bass heads, FlexBass II. ASIO 2.2 is also supported for professional DAW tasks, should you need. Windows 10 beta drivers are available now, and that’s what we used for our testing.

We spent a few days building a Windows 10 Pro machine for testing the Devil HDX with Cmedia’s beta Windows 10 drivers. You’ll be advised to get a book to read because Cmedia’s download site (FTP) is really, really, really slow. They do install and are very stable. But, the Xear effects still don’t function properly above 48KHz sample rates. You might wonder about Dolby decoding, and no, that’s not a feature with the CMI8888 DSP. There are versions that do support Dolby Home Theater and Master Studio, the CMI8888DHT and DMS chips. Since the Devil HDX is a headphone focused, we wouldn’t really need the extra cost with Dolby licensing.

The most notable oddity with the drivers is the labeling. There’s not a dedicated ‘Headphone’ volume, it’s just labeled as Speakers. You do get a picture to help differentiating. We mentioned that in the design of the Devil HDX, the Wolfson WM8741 DAC drives either the RCA output or the ¼” headphone output, so I guess the Speaker label is more applicable. Confusing, though.

Once you’re up and running with the Devil HDX, all the driver functions are accessible with a right mouse click on an input or output.

The first thing you’ll want to play with is the sample rates. The Devil HDX is capable of running at 192KHz at 24-bit resolution. If you’re using the Xear effects, you’ll want to keep the sample rate at 48KHz or the effect will distort.

There’s quite a lot of Xear effects to play with, depending on your setup. While we didn’t test all the modes presented here (we don’t have external speakers setup), they all function. Some were worth using, like the equaliser, a few weren’t applicable to the hardcore headphone user.

The FlexBass2 and Dynamic Bass features actually cut your bass output below a certain frequency if you use them at default. This might be useful with speakers that are a little bass challenged or need to fix a room acoustic.

Anybody remember using Creative’s Crystallizer? The Xear Audio Brilliant is somewhat the same idea, a dynamic filter that boosts high frequencies. While Creative’s implementation also included dynamic compression along with the filter, the Xear dynamic compression is different feature, Smart Volume.

Of course, what would a sound card be if it could not also digitize sound? The Devil HDX has three menus for handling your microphone or line-in. The first is sample rates, and the ADC portion of the Devil HDX can handle 192KHz at 24-bit digitization.

You also get noise suppression on the microphone, as well as my favourite feature, SingFX. With this you can alter your voice, which its only purpose is to mess with your teammates. The Devil HDX does this very well.

There’s so many other features included with the Xear suite, testing becomes very laborious. We’ve got so much more to get to here. However, the Xear suite is very well featured, and while not as well equipped as Creative’s drivers, they are stable and compare well feature for feature. What you’ll care about is not using Xear effects above 48KHz.

Let’s move on to objective testing with the Devil HDX.