Philips Acoustic Edge PSC 706 Review - PAGE 1Anthony Roberts - Thursday, December 7th, 2000
Introduction
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| The Acoutic Edge's Boxshot |
There are two things that are becoming more and more apparent. The first is that computer/multimedia audio is becoming increasingly important to consumers. The second is the unmistakable rise of multichannel surround sound on the personal computer. We saw it first with the 4.1 surround systems, like the
Cambridge Soundworks FPS2000 and the
Altec Lansing ACS56. Later the 5.1 systems like the
MidiLand S4 7100s and the
Cambridge Soundworks DTT2500 started to rear their heads. With the 5.1 systems gaining momentum, thanks to DVD drives, the time was ripe for a whole new generation of 5.1 capable sound cards. The Santa Cruz/Sonic Fury and the Creative Sound Blaster Platinum 5.1 were two such cards, and now, the all new Philips Acoustic Edge is another.
The Acoustic Edge is powered by Philips’ own SAA7785 ThunderBird Avenger DSP chip. This audio accelerator can process 256 sounds simultaneously and actually offloads digital mixing and Directsound processing from your CPU. This becomes important when you consider that the card has some sophisticated features that would otherwise put added stress on your system. As it is, many of the card’s special processing features are “free”. The chip can also process 96 streams of 3D accelerated audio including positional reverb, so it is a fairly powerful and full featured DSP chip.
Most of the time we try to avoid printing out specs on our reviews, but in this case it is something you want to take a look at:
Card Specs:
Support for Win9X, Win2000 (final product will ship with W2K WDM drivers)
Coaxial SPDIF Input/Output
2,4.1 and 5.1 speaker support
SNR > 92dB typical
96 streams of 3D audio acceleration including position reverb
256 streams of DirectSound accelerations and digital mixing
Up to 576 total wavetable synthesis voices
Reverb and chorus
96 channel hardware CD quality (16 bit, 44.1khz) wavetable synthesizer with 5.9MB sample set
Processing Features:
QSound3DInteractive interactive positional 3D for 2 speakers, 4 speakers or 5.1 speakers
QSound Multi-Speaker System stereo to quadraphonic or stereo to 5.1 processing
QSound Environmental Modeling (I3D Level 2.0, EAX 1.0/2.0 compatible)
QXpander and stereo-to-3D remapping
Qsurround virtual 5.1 playback of DVDs using 2 speakers
Philips believes this card sets itself apart from the SBLive 5.1 and the Santa Cruz because it is the very first card to enable true 5.1 audio from ANY source. That means that even stereo sources will output in 6 discrete channels using Qsound’s patented Multi-Speaker System technology. This technology essentially extracts positional information from a stereo stream, and maps it to a 5.1 or 4.1 setup to produce discrete and distinctive channels of surround sound. This is a pretty good pitch, because right now all surround sound cards will output the exact same sound on the front channel as on the rear channel, so that the rear channel is nothing more than a mirror image of the front stereo signals. This applies to anything based on the Vortex2 or the Sensaura Canyon3D chips, and even to the newest SBLive 5.1 and Turtle Beach Santa Cruz cards.
I’ve been playing with sound cards for a fair while now, and most 3D algorithms have failed to impress me to any degree. Obviously this changed when the EAX and A3D API’s were introduced. But still, all those Qsound algorithms in the specs wouldn’t have made me bat an eye, had you simply listed them to me. But this time around, these algorithms actually made me sit up and take notice. Why you ask? They work. And they work very well.
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| The Whole Package & Vertical View of the Card |
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