Preparation for Mixpander in a Surround Sound environment

It is possible to use the Mixpander PCI sound card together with the iBox 48-SA for play-out of surround sound. There are some things to prepare before installing MultiPlayer. Of course the long PCI card must be inserted to a PCI board and the iBox must be connected and powered on. Afterwards the Mixer must be installed which requires a first reboot. The next step is an update of the drivers. Please visit the website of SSL to get access to the current drivers.

The WDM driver will be installed automatically after the first reboot.

If there is any firmware upgrade inside the driver package you will get a dialog window with the current version and the new version of the drivers. Just follow the setup dialog to upgrade your firmware.

At this stage you normally install the MultiPlayer. For such a setup you would choose the devices like STR 1-2, STR 3-4 and so on. For surround sound we need more than 2 channels. Therefore we must reconfigure the audio devices before installing MultiPlayer.

This can be done in the Control Panel of Windows. Open the settings for audio devices from the Control Panel and in the settings dialog go to the tab Hardware. There you need to select the legacy audio driver and open its properties. The new dialog window has also a tab called Properties. Please change to this tab and select your sound card: Soundscape MultiMedia. Press the button Configuration. A new window opens.

Within this window you can select the number of audio channels of a device. Switch the preset from 2 to 8 channels and press the button OK. You need to reboot to activate the changes.

After the reboot you can install MultiPlayer. You need to select 5.1 + Stereo instead of Stereo for all channels. The channel assignment will now offer STR 1-7, STR 8-15 instead of STR 1-2, STR 2-3 and so on. This shows you that the MultiPlayer will have 8 channels of audio per device.

Please be careful regarding the number of slots and the number of channels you want to install within MultiPlayer. The MultiPlayer needs to reserve RAM for all surround channels and all slots. If you are running out of memory you will get error messages during startup. Our recommendation is to use at least 3 GB of RAM. Additional a 2 CPU system is recommended.