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Review
Installation & Documentation
Ease of use
Value for money
Price approx.	$229 incl GST
Operating System	OS 9.2+ OS X 10.1+
Available from	www.m-audio.com

It's all very well watching DVDs on your Mac, but when you haven't got surround sound you're missing out - but help is at hand.

M-audio's Sonica is essentially an external USB soundcard to allow throughput of digital audio formats like Dolby Digital and DTS as well as providing an effective audio line out via USB. Then all you need is a digital-equipped receiver or stereo.

Shelling out
A plastic shell has a USB plug at one end, with a minijack and optical output at the other. It's small and light with a delightful blue LED that glows when the device is connected.

The self-powered Sonica is utterly basic to configure for OS X - download the latest drivers, double click the installer and configure it all via the System Preferences panel that appears. Then tell the Sound panel that you want to output audio via the Sonica and you've got the perfect consumer-level 24-bit/96kHz portable audio out.

SRS TruSurround support is an added bonus - allowing a surround sound from a stereo source. The quality isn't as flash as the DTS or DD formats, but there is enough ability to tweak the sound to markedly improve the majority of sources. It definitely adds a degree of realism to games when there's audio from behind you - and this will let you run multiple speaker systems quite easily.

Player upgrade
To enjoy the flash digital surround tricks, you do need to download a multi-channel DVD player (there's a link from the Sonica section of www.m-audio.com). This is a fairly basic player, but allows OS X users to get the full digital experience. OS 9 users will have to suffer though, as the player was originally written for Unix and ported across platforms but not 9, unfortunately.

Pros

• 5.1 surround for your Mac

Cons

• An RCA-out would be nice

© Parkside Media 2003
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a guest said: September 27, 2006   Votes: +0

	Just got one. Set it up to pass from quicksilver g4 to technics receiver running 5.1 wharfdales. prologic on technics works MUCH better if all the sonica stuff (truesound, dialog, enchancement and trubass) are all turned off. listening to salmonella dub and loving it. VLC media player works great for 5.1 dvd playback. Rock on
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