I have one in my P3TDle rig under XP, and sharing with a Guillemot HS64. Haven't used the flexibility in years, but it did help with DVD-A disc that are 24/96. Definitely a nice card.

The 24/96 capability is hardly impressive today as even Realtek chips are specified for 24/196 now... the Terratec card still beats them in terms of SNR though.

thanks for the info!
Because of the waveblaster header I got several years back a boxed/new SixPack 5.1+ , the DMX was still "expensive" back then... can't say that I used it much, but a DB50XG was working fine on a dualcore pc of the time 😁
The state of win7 drivers is unclear (even though the sixpack is Crystal based it's in the same boat as the DMX I suppose...), I doubt there are 64bit ones available, one might get the vista/x86 ones going but that's pretty much the newest OS it supports IMHO

64-bit is supported according to the readme, updated drivers for that are only to be found on their FTP server though, the ones that are offered on the regular site date back to 2003... I've seen claims of people running this card under Win7 x64, supposedly installation in safe mode is a must. I'd really have to try it myself to give any sort of review on it though, until then I wouldn't claim that the card is 7 x64 compatible 😀

heh, checked again, you can only find the sixpack on the ftp... but the DMX is listed on the site , it has more support 😀

Well what I can definitely say so far is that the software is garbage... using the newest beta drivers for XP. The mixer volume settings are unreliable and respond whenever they feel like it and it took me several tries to get digital in even working... and with the card being set to external 44.1 kHz and the issues with that sample rate all of the sounds from the main PC come out garbled. Sometimes certain settings just get stuck, requiring a reboot to get sound out of the PC again.

Seriously, why can't this sound card stuff just work... really the only thing that seems to work 100% without hassle is onboard 😠

That is true, the software is a bit iffy. Back in the day it did alot of work for me, and while DVD-A was around it was my ticket. When I moved that machine to XP for one specific program and little better wifi/4G control I believe I used W2K drivers. It does drop off every so often and then adds a hiss to the background. I typically ignore it and have that ISA HS64 to some little electrostatics and just let it stream radio. I'm wasting it all at the moment. A decade ago playing any source through to a 60Wx8 with dual subs it was spectacular. I settled on a M-Audio card in another machine here, and then figured my current onboard Azalia whatever is good enough.

Well I downgraded the drivers to those from 2003 (5.40) and while they do have some of the same issues they seem overall more solid so far. So I'll use those for a while and see how it goes.

By now I have a firm opinion that these companies just can't write proper drivers for their sound hardware, regardless of how "high end" it might be. Sadly onboard feels more responsive than any sound card I've used. I gauge this by something like pausing and playing a video and listening if sound pops are audible. On sound cards this is most likely the case while on onboard it never happens. I think it might be some PCI/PCIe latency issue.

I've been using Creative cards for my main pcs since the XP area, didn't notice any probs... especially on my latest cards (XFi pci and auzentech xfi forte) I am VERY satisfied...
But yeah, it was common back then for cards to have driver probs, the WORST being that manufacturers modified the chipset in a way that only their specific driver works. This practice just sucks. You might have a card with a common chipset and not be able to use it because of hardware branding and there is no driver updates. Bah.

I generally found pci soundcards fine. Onboard sometimes doesn't sound as good and I've had issues with dos sound, and pops etc. On pci cards:

I found the SB128 PCI cards stable, simple to install and never caused problems.

Same with the Santa Cruz except once [though I concluded that was a borked card, it may have been a sonic fury I was trying to use with TB drivers - though I've since bought a sonic fury and it works with stock drivers so a lot of them seem to be mixed up].

SB Live I avoided for years after wasting time one of those damn dell oem cards. Bought specific models since and only had issues with standard win2k drivers not having all features.

Aureal vortex cards at first were a right pain with drivers not installing or crashing, but that seems solved now, dunno why. Maybe sticking to 98.

Yamaha sp724 always worked fine except when sharing a system with a vortex but again, I seem to have solved that now [I think basically despite what the driver says, an mx300 cannot send dosbox midi through the sp724 wavetable].

Never tried a dmx but always half-planned to. In light of the above - as an ews64xl owner - I'm not sure I could take it 🤣 it sounds like the same kind of random-seeming behaviour the ews64xl sometimes has. Probably is a logic somewhere.

I wonder if high-end sounds cards aren't a bit like workstation graphics cards. Maybe aimed at specific tasks and do them very well, but not so good for consumers?

If you look at the box of the 6fire card it advertises "High Resolution DVD/Games/Music". It retailed for about 240 EUR when it came out. I wouldn't call it a pure workstation card. It was competing with Audigy Platinum which had a similar I/O rack. Even EWS64 XL I wouldn't call a card targeted 100% at music creation as they went through the hassle of including that SB compatible codec and advertised it as gaming compatible. Not sure if anyone actually used Dream based cards for DOS games back then however.

When I was talking about onboard I only meant the modern solutions. I use the 6fire card in my main PC which otherwise has a Realtek ALC892. Very solid and reliable overall. It's just the maximal recording volume that could be higher.

I've used X-Fi Titanium in this PC before and it sucked hard. The mode switch was buggy and the drivers were extremely prone to crashing. Best of all, recordings were so noisy that the card was completely unusable in my system, as was the front headphone jack on my case.

The 6fire would be an awesome card if the drivers weren't so finnicky... they are actually many times simpler than on the EWS64, it's just one application with some mixer settings, DMA buffer size and that master sampling rate. The last one is the most annoying since for some reason it does seem to require locked 96 kHz for everything to work properly, unless using the external setting for digital in. I wouldn't complain if just switching that each time would be enough, but that setting definitely likes to hang. Could be a design decision but it's annoying when you have to wait a certain amount of time before being able to get sound out of the PC after using digital in.

Found out something else btw. I played an FMOD game and noticed that the sounds aren't fading correctly. Didn't even know that FMOD uses DS3D! It simply doesn't work when Sensaura is turned off. In Sensaura mode it works like usual, but of course digital in is not accessible and you have to reboot the PC each time to change the mode. All of this is regardless of hardware acceleration setting, so it means that just because the driver doesn't support DS3D without that Sensaura mode it is not usable even through software calculations.

@d1stortion
Sorry to wake up this rather old thread, but I just wanted to say I am still using my Terratec DMX 6fire card today under Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit edition with the old beta Vista 64-bit driver and it works better under windows 8.1 than it did under Vista 64-bit edition.

All the inputs still work fine including the internal wave card header which I use for connecting my old Yamaha wavetable db50xg and midi playback for dos box.

For whatever reason I have never been able to get the digital outputs working reliable under windows Vista 64-bit addition or Windows 8 so I use another sound card for that and get windows to pass the sound between card digitally.

I am dreading needing to move to Windows 10 sometime in the future as I will need to find a new sound card with a wavetable connector and phono inputs for those rare occasions I want to connect a record player to my modern sound system.

I actually found this topic while googling for Windows10 drivers for this rather old card.

I also still use the midi connectors under Windows 8.1 to connect my even more dated Roland MT-32 module, so between it and my old Yamaha DG50GX all my dos box midi requirements are covered.

So yes you can still make good use of this card under a modern 64-bit version of Windows but if you need digital outputs you really need a more modern card with drivers designed for use under Vista and newer as I never got them working right under Vista, Windows7 or Windows 8.

You also still need to use the DMX 6Fire ControlPanel utility to swap the Line input between "Front/rear/wavetable" and the other input between "mic/phono" which works OK if you run it in "Windows XP Service pack 3" Compatibility mode but I don't recommend playing with the other option as some of them can crash your PC and the windows sound settings in the control panel override them anyway.

That's interesting! The newest OS I ever used the DMX 6fire with is Windows XP and the software was quite temperamental, as other described. What kind of system are you using to run this card on Windows 8.1?

Just wanted to chip in here with some info about using headphones with this card (which I own):

A review from Tom's Hardware (Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96 vs. Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum) states, regarding the DMX 6Fire control panel:

There is a choice of 2 satellites, 4 satellites and 5.1 speakers, but not a specific headphone mode, which could definitely be a drawback for night-time players. An HRTF filter dedicated to headphones would be much better than using the default 2 satellite mode.

After playing around with another Terratec sound card, the DMX Xfire 1024, I noticed that its control panel also "lost" the headphone option in later driver revisions. Definitely strange, but there is a quick solution which applies to both cards: under the Windows control panel > Multimedia, you simply need to select "Stereo headphones" as the output device.

In this case, when opening Sensaura player, "Headphhone mode" is automatically selected as opposed to speaker mode. This should then also apply to games that don't have speaker/headphone mode selections in menus.

To me, it sounds like HRTF is working properly (height included - one example being Clive Barker's Undying).