Elite Bastards take a look at HDA's Digital X Mystique 7.1 Gold discrete sound card, the first of its kind to support real time Dolby Digital encoding via its Dolby Digital Live support.

While graphics cards and processors seem to have an almost infinite path of upgrades, improvements and speed increases, the world of the sound card has been a much more hit-and-miss affair. In the past we've seen struggles for market share between Aureal and Creative and the wonderful SoundStorm APU on NVIDIA's nForce 2 motherboard chipset to brighten up and push forward audio technology in the PC. Now Aureal have come and gone, and SoundStorm is no more (for the time being at least), there's been a paucity in the solutions available to PC sound enthusiasts - You either stick with an integrated solution, or buy a Creative product.

SoundStorm is missed in particular due to its ability to both decode and (more importantly) encode a Dolby Digital signal, a feature which was much-loved by almost anybody who used it. Since this APU was dropped from the nForce3 onward, such functionality has been notable by its absence - Until now. Enter HDA, and their Digital X Mystique 7.1 Gold board, the first discrete sound card solution to feature Dolby Digital Live real-time encoding.

Of course, being the first to support a feature is all good and well, but does it work and how well? That's what we're here to find out.

HDA Digital X Mystique 7.1 Gold sound card