Sound Support

The main competitive differences between Creative's offerings and the Vortex2 boards are 3D sound support: The Creative cards feature Enviromental Audio (EAX) while Aureal sports it's own audio API, A3D. Both of these standards offer good 3D sound, but their are several major differences. Creative's EAX uses pre-programmed reverbs for 3D sound. This is good in that it's eats up less CPU cycles, but the sound is not as impressive. A3D 2.0, the API for the Vortex2 chipset in the SQ2500, uses an advanced sound technique called Wave Tracing. Essentially, what wave tracing does it take a geometric "picture" of the enviroment you're in, then accurately tracks the sound reflections and reverbs in real-time, giving extremely accurate, precision sound effects. This technique is superior in almost every way to EAX, but has several flaws.

One flaw is the way it's done. Calculating the geometry of the room or area you are in during the game eats up CPU cycles and can impact your frame rate. This is a moot point for single-player games like Half-Life, but for gamers who crave online deathmatches and want every frame they can get, A3D isn't what they'll want. Of course, this brings us to another flaw. When using 3D sound (either EAX or A3D), the way the sound is handled makes hearing players in other rooms impossible. Since the sound reverbs and noises are handled in 3D space and not just simply played, you won't be able to hear Armed Lemming in the next room grabbing a Quad or gun fire until your realistically close to where the sounds are coming from. Of course, no game makes you use A3D, so you can always turn it on for single player and off for multiplayer.

And turning it off is not a bad thing either. The Aureal SQ 2500 can handle up to 92 DirectSound streams in hardware, and 76 DirectSound3D streams. I actually went from 19.4 to 20.4 in Quake3 on my Pentium 200 using regular sound, and MIDIs and WAVs sound clear, crisp and loud!

Speaker and Device Connectors

The SQ2500 comes with quite a few connectors on the back, all nicely color coded. It has 2 speaker connectors for front and back channels, giving you four speaker support, a line input, microphone input, a Game/MIDI port for keyboards and old-style controllers, and a suprising Coaxial S/PDIF connector. A wide range of connectors indeed. Especially that Coaxial connector. This gives you the ability to connect many consumer products, such as stereos and speakers, to the SQ2500, and it's all on-board. The Diamond MX300, another Vortex2 product, needs a daughter-board for the Coaxial port. The inclusion of a unneeded but very nice feature for a cheap sound card is a very big bonus.

Page 4: Special Features and Wrap-up