QSND is alive and well - in lots of mobile phones and other nifty stuff.

I used to be a Product Manager there. Great little company with some awesome IP. They have had solid leadership for more than a decade after some tulmultous years with the first CEO - Rickman.

This news put a smile on my face. I am not surpised to see it here, as the Tech Report was one of the only sites that ever did decent audio card reviews.

Heh... with all the 'Q's running around, I'm surprised they didn't rename the chips "QInyl QAudio".

This doesn't seem terribly useful to me, but I guess they've got make at least a token attempt to keep up with Creative from a feature checklist standpoint.

It's a shame their Envy-based line of chips never really caught on; it's a decent codec, and IMO actually had a shot at taking on Creative.

I miss hardware sound that actually mattered, like A3D 2.0. Here we are almost 10 years later and there's nothing on the market that even comes close the realism that A3D 2.0 offered. It could do with 2 speakers what EAX couldn't manage with 5: create an enveloping surround. Damn Creative and their lawsuits.

With regards to PC audio, when people refer to an audio card's "codec", do they really mean "DAC"?

This is one of those areas (like desktop card games) I am in favor of MS taking over.

Creative have done such a fantastic job of bending us all over a barrel behind the proverbial shed to apply the proverbial rectal intrusion with the proverbial rake handle that I am (and I should think, everyone else are) sick and tired of it.

Let's make it software and be done with it. Hardware acceleration for audio is silly at this point. A hard drive (the slowest by several orders of magnitude component in the modern Computer data path) can write several 10Mbps audio streams SIMULTANEOUSLY. I don't care how sophisticated your post-processign algorithmic whatsamawhosit is, my 3.4 BILLION cycle per second CPU with hundreds of Gigabytes of cross-chip bandwidth can crunch it in software. If you need more, invest in low-end professional grade.

Wow, QSound is still around? I thought they had died off almost a decade ago.

Does anybody actually USE the various effects and environmental stuff that comes in driver suites all the time? Who ever turns on reverb when they're playing music, or sets it up to sound like you're underwater or in a tiled bathroom?

The 3D enhancement for headphones I understand a lot of people like, and being able to enhance portions of the audio like voices is nice, but most of the crap in audio control panels is a waste of their time and the money I paid them.

Philips's older sound cards - the Acoustic Edge comes to mind - supported QSound and it was fantastic with headphones or a nice set of 2.0/2.1 speakers. I had two of those and was sad to see Philips give up on the market so quickly... I think they could have been a pretty strong competitor to Creative. Anyways, hopefully Via's QSound implementation will be similar.

Via's been pretty quiet about sound recently (har har)... haven't seen much new out of them since onboard HD audio started to take off. Doesn't look like they've updated the Envy line much since then (not that they really need to do anything to its specs)... it would be cool if this support eventually expanded through their whole lineup, I bet a lot of people with AV-710s would be happy to see this in a driver update.

Seriously, it's the best $25 sound card ever.

I'd really like to see a Via Envy24HT mk.2, but I doubt it'll ever happen. The rumors I heard were that Via bought out ICEnsemble for their driver guys and nothing else.

I'm also not really willing to forgo my onboard HD Audio for my PCI AV-710 either, sorry. It sounds good but not better.