Hercules Fortissimo III 7.1 and Digifire 7.1

Fortissimo III 7.1: Drivers

As usual with Hercules, great care has been taken with the card driver interface. It is good-looking, complete and very well organized. Among its good points is the "Small Speaker" checkbox in the General tab. You should know there are two ways of managing low frequencies in 5.1, depending on the size and type of speakers connected to the sound card.

In theory, the Cirrus Logic 4624 chipset only manages one mode: Large Speaker Mode. This means that the output device sends a full-frequency signal to all the elements without redirecting or filtering low frequencies to the subwoofer alone. So sounds logically dedicated to the LFE channel by the DVD software are dispatched to all the elements. In Small Speaker mode the card can redirect low frequencies specifically to the subwoofer, making for clearer and better positioned sound. So Hercules had a good idea in adding this configuration mode to the drivers. You can use amplified multimedia or hi-fi speakers, but also non-amplified ones like the ones in mural systems.