Shock FX
We were surprised by the quality of the effects. The potential of the E-Mu processor can be seen immediately in the clearness of the modeled rooms, in which the sounds spread with precision and regularity. The reverb gives the voices a majestic sound, while the choruses and the flange do a marvelous job on acoustic and electric guitars. Faced with such beauty, it is a little frustrating not to find a single control on the Creative mixing desk for the effects, especially when there is, paradoxically, an extensive range of other parameters. For the first time on a card designed for general use, it is possible to create one's own effects while controlling each parameter down to the last detail, which gives all the subtleties needed for sound processing. It is the EAX control panel that gives simultaneous access to the two active effects buses under Windows. At the same time you can use reverberation, a chorus and several other effects at choice: Auto Wah, normalizer, distortion, echo, parametric equalizer, flanger, frequency shifter, pitch shifter, ring modulator, vocal morphing. We ended up putting four different effects in a series, counting reverb and chorus; however, it doesn't seem possible to allocate them to separate inputs/outputs. After editing the parameters, the dosage of each effect is controlled with the original sound, a function that could perhaps be carried out by a MIDI controller. Working on the sound in the effects editor seems to us absolutely necessary if you want to exploit the real potential of this system. We would remind you that these effects are available in real time via the outputs on the sound card, which makes it possible to break away from effects created by software, which are often of lower quality and always slower than a hardware solution using a processor.
