7.1-channel sound cards are not exactly thick on the ground, particularly those costing under £30, so plenty of games and home cinema enthusiasts may be considering this Terratec Aureon 7.1 PCI sound card for their systems. It has a column of eight sockets down its back panel, providing microphone and line inputs, four analogue speaker outputs and a pair of S/PDIF optical digital sockets for digital input and output.

You can switch the microphone input to a headphone output, which is handy, but only by swapping jumpers on the board, not under software control.

Terratec, never one for useful printed documentation, excels itself here with just three pages of set-up information. They include a diagram of the card, where the sockets are numbered 1 to 11 and the captions explaining their functions are numbered 12 to 22 (or 23 to 33 in French, 34 to 44 in Italian, etc.). Could we offer our services as proof readers?

One or two clarifications are necessary on exactly what you can get out of this card. You can get 7.1-channel sound, with three speakers at the front, two at the side, two at the rear and a sub-woofer, but only from the four analogue jack outputs on the back panel.

You can also get Dolby Digital Live output, creating surround sound on the fly from a variety of sound sources, but only from the optical S/PDIF output. The maximum number of channels you can get from Dolby Digital Live is 5.1, not 7.1, but that's a Dolby restriction, not a Terratec one. And, of course, to get Dolby sound from the S/PDIF data stream, you'll need a suitable decoder/amplifier with an optical S/PDIF input.

The sound is pretty good: open and clear and considerably better than the 'on-board' sound from the system motherboard of the PC we tested it on. It enlivens games and sounds great on DVDs and music. 7.1 sound sources are still thin on the ground, but the ones we tried sounded atmospheric.

What wasn't so atmospheric was the blue screen we saw when switching from 7.1 to stereo sound. The driver appears to fall over when you switch sound modes, which obviously isn't as it should be. Terratec says it knows about the problem and is changing the driver so the option to switch modes is greyed out when there's a sound file playing. We suggest you get hold of this driver as soon as it's available.

The Aureon 7.1 PCI is an economical card which does do what it says on its rather oversized box, but with conditions. One of the most important of those is that you don't switch playback modes while there's any sound coming through your speakers. Other than that, it's good value and works well.