Covering its bits

The Barracuda AC-1 is packaged in a typically Razer way with everything black with green highlights. After a little bit of foil writing, the front of the box is how they like it.

After popping open the front, you see a black insert which once removed shows you what the box contains. You get a whole bunch of promotional leaflets, a manual, certificate of authenticity, a quick start guide, the card itself, a HD-DAI adapter and an all important lanyard.

The card itself is clad in a metal box which has a Barracuda graphic on it. This is apparently meant to passively protect the components underneath from EMI which your PC makes. This will hopefully stop any very minor distortions in sound. I can’t honestly see an aluminium box doing that but we shall see.

As anything covered is interesting, I took off the cover to see what’s underneath. You’ll find a whole bunch of capacitors which will make the sound, well sound good. At the top of the card is a load of green LED’s that will shine through the EMI ‘shield’ and light up the logo. I’m surprised it’s not blue, like every other Razer component.

On the side of the ‘shield’, you’ll find internal connectors that allow you to plug in front audio ports, CD and Aux in. The addition of the front audio socket is nice to see as often sound cards miss out this important connectivity.

The chip that’s not under the shield is the ‘Razer Fidelity’ chip which is essentially the brains of the unit.

Looking at the back of the card, it looks fairly simple with the tracks of the PCB being fairly widely laid out. The card looks far from crowded.

The specs of the card look very good on paper, and the SNR (signal to noise ratio) is better than the Creative X-Fi’s which shows how much noise there is per amount of wanted signal. Higher numbers mean less noise. There are little enhancements that the AC-1 has, which are completely Razer’s innovations. One of the more ridiculous is the HD-DAI connector. This sits on the back of the card next to optical in and out ports (S/PDIF).

This is basically a DVI port with the last 3 pins missing (so you can’t plug it into your GFX card by mistake). The only benefit to using this port compared to the standard sockets is to a) reduce space used on the back of the card, and b) to provide power to the Barracuda headset that this card is designed for. Fortunately if you don’t have a Razer headset, then the packaged adapter will allow the usual audio connector to be used. This adapter terminates in 7 sockets allowing for 7.1 surround sound and a microphone to be used.

Another ability of the card is Razer ESP. This stands for Enhanced Sonic Perception. This beefs up your ability to position sounds so that you know exactly where your enemy is coming from. Should be interesting…