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Simon King puts Videologic's Vortex 2 based Sonic Vortex 2 to the test |
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Sonic Vortex 2 - Simon King - Last updated February 12, 2001
Introduction: Update: The designer and driver developer for the Vortex2, the chip this card uses, Aureal, has ceased to exist. Creative Technology announced on September 21, 2000 that they would buy substantially all of the assets of Aureal Semiconductor, Inc., including patents, trademarks and other intellectual property. Creative Labs Craig McHugh last year said in an interview done by MaximumPC made it clear that Creative only bought the intellectual property not the liability. That is they will not sell, support or develop drivers for Aureal products. Quite similar to the deal between Nvidia and 3dfx. Craig also said that Aureal has retained contractors to finish a set of drivers for Aureal based cards. However several months has now passed without seen any new driver release which makes us believe their won't be any more driver release for this chip. VideoLogic also late last year issued the following statement on their website
As VideoLogic says the current Win9x drivers works well with most games that support DS3D or A3D. However the EAX 1.0 support is limited (only works well with some games) and there is no support for EAX 2.0. It's also doubtful how it will work with DS3D games in the future when MS adds new features. The last version DirectX8 doesn't include any new features for DS3D that require driver changes but future versions may. The Windows 2000 WDM drivers are beta form and cause problem on many systems but at least on some systems they work fairly well for DS3D and A3D 1.0 games while A3D 2.0 support is more limited. The drivers also lacks EAX 1.0 support. If you use WindowsME we suggest you try the VXD drivers and not the WDM drivers. It's currently uncertain if the next version of Windows will work with the WDM drivers but we do know that WindowsME is the last release where VXD drivers will be supported. We still think this card is an interesting option thanks to being the only card that can take full advantage of the wavetracing that some A3D 2.0 games offers but we don't recommend anyone to buy a Vortex2 based card as their only soundcard at this point. End of update
VideoLogic Systems is one of two divisions of Imagination Technologies (formerly known as VideoLogic) a UK company that's famous mostly for their 3D graphics chips which are sold in the PC market (e.g. Neon250) consoles (Dreamcast) and arcades. The 3D graphics chips are designed by the other division now called PowerVR technology. The System division is the one selling the products to the end users. When it comes to the audio market VideoLogic Systems have sold soundcards for sometime but since they used other companies chips (e.g. ESS and Aureal's) they haven't received a lot of attention, at least not outside UK. When VideoLogic late last year decided that they would enter the multimedia speaker market they knew that they would need something more than just a "me too" product to have any success. If you read my review of the Sirocco, a powerful 2.1 speaker system, you know that the Sirocco was more than enough for VideoLogic to enter the speaker market with a splash. Well, Videologic’s previous sound card, the Sonicstorm Pro got fairly heavily panned when I got my hands on it. Since then, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to listen to their Sirocco speakers. And I must admit, I was slightly confused. Why were Videologic making such superb speakers when their premier soundcard was a little bit, well, pants? A quite a few weeks ago the answer came through the post. The Sonic Vortex 2.Another Vortex 2 based card in an already crowded market, the Sonic Vortex 2 has to do something special. Videologic have excelled before with their software bundle, and it doesn’t look too shabby here. So let’s take the SV2 for a walk down review road. Technical Overview: Vortex 2 Features Videologic's Sonic Vortex 2 uses Aureal’s Vortex 2 SuperQuad reference board (literally) just like Xitel's Storm Platinum, Terratec's XLerate Pro, Absolute Multimedia's Outrageous 3D sound and of course Aureal with their own System Integrator board. Diamond and Turtle Beach are the only two to Vortex 2 partners to alter the reference design. The good news about being a reference design is that it will use reference drivers, so if you go for the latest update, you won’t lose your rear speakers unlike the Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla. However, on past performance at least, Videologic have been very good at keeping pace with Aureal. Just like all other Vortex 2 boards Outrageous 3D sound offers these key features:
The different types of streams can be mixed and matched in various ways, but they always have to add up to a maximum of 96. Note that there are other types of streams (e.g. wavOut) but these are the common ones. *76 3D streams for DS3D and A3D 1.x are accessible using Aureal’s 2030 and later reference drivers which have enabled 76 3D steams for 2 speaker and headphone modes but not four speaker modes. The Sonic Vortex 2 shipped with customized 2016 based drivers but we tested with the customized 2035 reference drivers available from Videologic.
If you are looking for digital connectivity and can use a optical connector then the Videologic Sonic Vortex 2 has has one built in. Most MiniDisc players have an optical connection, some use the COAX input and others actually have both. It's the same for home theater speakers as some use optical, some use COAX and some use both. For example, Cambridge Soundworks uses a coax connector and Videologic uses both so if digital connectivity is important to you be sure and keep this in mind as the best Vortex 2 choice if you need a COAX connector is currently Voyetra Turtle Beach’s Quadzilla or Aureal's new SQ2500 and if you need both, Voyetra Turtle Beach also makes a bracket board with coax and optical I/Os plus the option of the full Home Studio Edition. For the SonicVortex 2 you also have the option of using one of the optical to coax converters on the market but they are pretty expensive (around the same price as a Vortex 2 board) so not really worth it for this purpose in our opinion. An example of a converter can be found at Midiman and comes with an $80 price tag. All things being equal, if you need the digital output and can use an optical connector instead of a COAX you are two steps ahead of Diamond which offers the MX25 for $40 and one step ahead of Turtle Beach which goes the bracket board route at no extra cost but takes up more space. Turtle Beach has also been very slow with driver updates which really hurts since reference drivers will not work correctly with the quadzilla.Diamond, on the other hand, despite varying the reference design, delivered four speaker support on one board with the MX300 which was bang on to gamers needs. However, for digital connectivity, they also chose to go the bracket board route and in our opinion, have let down all of the MX300 owners who bought with the assurance from Diamond that digital connectivity would be just around corner. It must have been a huge corner as it took nine months for the the MX25, which offers a COAX out and a price tag of $39.95, to ship.
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