Aureal Vortex2
Following in the wake of the very impressive Aureal Vortex card, the Vortex2 incorporates some of the most advanced 3D acoustic modelling techniques to place multipoint sound around the listener.
Featuring the Vortex2 audio processor, this chip is capable of full-duplex 48 KHz digital (DAT quality) recording and playback with a 576-voice wavetable synthesizer for very realistic and rich MIDI playback with digital output. The A3D 2.0 specification that is built into the card's driver features the capability of handling 16 discrete audio streams with 60 wall reflections for mathematically realistic sound reproduction.
In the tests, we observed the sound reproduction for MIDI playback, in games that support A3D. This was found to be extremely convincing and very immersive. The CPU utilisation was measured using the Ziff-Davis Audio WinBench 99 where it posted a very impressive score of 4.91 per cent for DirectSound (CD Quality) and 6.24 per cent for DirectSound 3D.
If surround sound is your main concern, the Aureal Vortex2 promises to be a good buy.