Update: The full review is now available

This fall Philips officially announced three new sound cards. The cards are all now shipping and are going by the names of Rhythmic Edge (stereo output), Seismic Edge (quad output) and Acoustic Edge (upto 6 channel output). Philips got a running start into the PC sound card market by taking over VLSI, the company who in partnership with QSound developed the Thunderbird 128. This chip seemed to have loads of potential but was hampered by poor market penetration as it never made it into a high profile sound card and the companies that did use it were slow on delivering available driver updates to the end user. The card we are going to take a quick look at in advance of our full review is the $99.99 Acoustic Edge.  Rather than take up space restating specifications and bundle information in these brief impressions we will point you to Philips's official pages for the new cards.

Philips Semiconductors’ Thunderbird Avenger - SAA7785 PCI audio chip powers the Acoustic Edge sound card. According to specifications the card offers up to 96 simultaneous 3D streams and 256 DirectSound streams and up to 576 Wavetable voices for MIDI music synthesis and a game port for analog and digital joysticks. The card also sports both a COAX SPDIF input and output with the star of the software bundle being the full version of PowerDVD 3.0 with full 6 channel support.

For the full review we will offer detailed benchmarks on how the card performs in test applications, games and PowerDVD. For now we can generalize and state that CPU usage is not a significant issue.

When it comes to games, in addition to plenty of 3D streams (more details in the full review on just how those 3D streams actually work out) the cards drivers offer full support for DS, DS3D, EAX 1 and 2.0 and A3D 1.0. This is all via an updated Q3D engine from QSound that under most conditions run exclusively on the Thunderbird Avenger DSP (although there is an auxiliary host DSP engine to guarantee functionality under extremely high concurrency).

We have just recently received beta Windows 2000 drivers so will hold comment on those for the full review and focus on the VXD drivers for these early impressions. In general the VXD drivers (tested in Windows 98 and Windows 98SE) are very good, especially considering that it’s a new card and QSound’s first shake down of their updated engine. Four speaker and six speaker output is particularly strong with no issues. The subwoofer output in 6-channel mode for gaming is also very effective with the drivers that we are currently testing with. Two speaker and headphone mode also run without issues. However, to our ears the two speaker and headphone 3D audio is not as quite as effective as the Live or especially cards like the Santa Cruz or SonicFury using Sensaura’s technology. It’s worth nothing that testing of both of these modes is quite a bit more subjective than the 4 or 6 channel modes. These modes can also be heavily impacted by head and ear size/shape so your own results may vary.

EAX support is on average good – sometimes our favorite but more often behind the Live. In most of those cases it’s less of a quality and more of a quantity issue and overall not quite as consistent as the Live when it comes to EAX support.

Overall sound quality is good, along the same lines as the Sound Blaster Live which we would put just behind the Santa Cruz/SonicFury. The control panel is streamlined and effective with a very nice speaker test applet built in.

While the fact that the card offers not just digital output but also digital input at the $100 price point will generate some interest in itself, the real unique feature of this card is QMSS. That stands for QSound Multi-Speaker System and it transforms stereo sources into 4 channel or 5.1 channel output. QMSS is automatically invoked for stereo applications if 4 channel or 5.1-channel mode is selected under Output Mode on the Settings tab of the control panel. In fact the only way to disable QMSS is to operate the system in two-speaker or headphone mode. Unlike most quad or six channel sound cards the Acoustic Edge does not simply mirror the stereo channels to the other outputs. Nor does it add reverb, which is another approach to two to four or six channel synthesis. Instead it uses QSound’s unique algorithms to create an effect that is similar in concept but not identical, to Dolby Prologic with some of the ambience placed in the rear channels. However it steers a lot more to the rear channels than Dolby Pro Logic does. This will come down to taste but we both found it to be much better than just stereo duplication to the rear speakers both with games and music.

When it comes to DVD, the current drivers only use the subwoofer output for the LFE channel so the system needs to be used with large speakers (not the case for games or music). This is where QMSS DVD comes into play. We were both very surprised at how effective this feature was at taking a Pro Logic or even a stereo source from a DVD and creating compelling multi-channel content. This is not to say that the discrete positioning is anywhere near as precise as true Dolby Digital 5.1 but it’s a heck of a lot better than stereo and we both preferred it to normal Dolby Pro Logic. In fact, true to the testament of some informal blind tests done by Philips, we can see how some people might even prefer the QMSS DVD effect at times to true 5.1 decoding. In the full review we will have more detail on the effectiveness of this feature. It’s also worth noting that a future driver update will allow for the redirection of bass from all channels and not just the LFE channel to the subwoofer out in DVD mode. This will give users of small multimedia 5.1 ready speaker systems like the MidiLand S4-7100 and Creative DTT2200 the option of traditional Dolby Digital 5.1 or QMSS DVD. The card also sports two speaker virtualization algorithms for DVD as well as two speaker expansion algorithms for stereo content. We have not check these features out in detail yet so will hold comment for the full review.

Work on the full review is almost complete and will contain significantly more detail on all aspects of the card’s performance including Windows 2000 testing. At this stage we can say that if you are looking for a four or six-channel sound card then the Acoustic Edge is a worthy competitor in the performance market segment offering good all round performance to go with a good feature set for the $100 price point.