Great review, Geoff! A few thoughts...

The poor frequency response at the high end is baffling. Designing audio circuits capable of flat response out to 20kHz isn't exactly rocket science, and it would border on moronic to use high quality Wolfson DACs, then cripple the final analog output stage like that. Giving Philips' hardware engineers the benefit of the doubt, I have a suspicion that this is a software (driver) problem, not a hardware one. Maybe the EQ isn't truly 'flat', even when it is set to 'flat'.

The other RightMark scores are much less important than the frequency response one. Even though the Philips consistently loses in the other RightMark tests as well, consider that the differences will probably be inaudible to 99% of listeners. Take noise level, for example... the difference between -110dB and -120dB is largely irrelevant, as most signal sources have a worse noise level than that anyway. (Audio CDs have a theoretical best-case S/N ratio of "only" 96dB.)

On the listening tests... this subtle 'echo' that some people heard on the Philips card raises questions. Is this echo something that was part of the original recording, that the Philips is better at reproducing? Or is it an artifact that the Philips card is introducing on its own? If it is the latter, then this is not a positive feature, it is a negative. A soundcard's job is to accurately reproduce the signal source, not introduce effects/coloration (unless you've deliberately enabled effects and/or EQ).

All things considered, it looks like a good (but not great) card. Perhaps it will find a place as the heir apparent to the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, now that Turtle Beach seems to have dropped the ball. For people who do not game a lot, it is probably a reasonable alternative to Creative.

Couldn't be that strereo crosstalk that's 30 decibels above the others, eh?

"That's not a bug, it's a feature!" :p

Might be a stupid question, but one thing I love to do with my Audigy 2 is play DVD audio--can this be done with the Envy24?

how does soundstorm compare to this?

It's still a cpu-based sound card; I'd much rather have a true hardware sound card (like a Creative). My cpu cycles are precious; games, folding, etc...don't need sound eating 'em up.

That said: how much of Soundstorm is run on the cpu?

This is probably a really stupid question, but it is something I've never understood. If one has a HT machine or a legitimate dual CPU rig, why would CPU-based audio calculations affect framerates? I mean, shouldn't those be off-loaded to the other physical/logical processor? Or do drive calculations *have* to run on CPU 0? In that case, could a game be run on CPU 1 (obviously only workable on a real dual CPU machine)?

I'm just going to go sob in the corner with my Realtek onboard. Computer audio sucks.

That frequency response for the card is really weird.

This is first year EE knowledge peeking through, so feel free to correct.

First order filters, past a certain frequency, display attenuation as a straight line when the frequency is a log scale. The attenuation generally lasts for about a decade or two.

Second order filters, IIRC, just attenuate more rapidly, but it still tends to be a straight line if you use a log f scale.

After a frequency well below 20kHz, that graph looks almost quadratic on a log scale. Any explanations?
-Mole

i wonder if the differences in these sound cards are part of the reason for different framerate #'s in video card roundups among hardware sites.

So does having 24 bit output buy you anything when using 16 bit sources such as MP3s or CD audio? I could see how upsampling to 24 bit would give you more headroom for effects and such, but otherwise is there a noticable difference?

Up to 20% CPU utilization? For a sound card? That's obscene. Add a similar percentage dip in game frame rates and that abysmal response curve, and this card makes my don't buy, don't even look at list, firmware sound effects notwithstanding.

Any chance of getting Turtle Beach's new Catalina and/or Riviera reviewed any time soon? TB has whacked a whole bunch of features from the Catalina, in comparison to the Santa Cruz, so this die-hard TB fanboy would be interested in seeing how well it fares the TR treatment.

Good review, Geoff.

#4 URL for the PSC706 Acoustic Edge XP drivers? Since last i checked, Philips no longer supports their older sound cards and their PC sound website has vanished. Thnx

I'm still in love with my Fortissimo 3, sounds good, lots of features... although I'd consider an Audigy for the EAX stuff.. I play a lot of games :)

EP

Well, cements the fact that Creative Labs is still the only solution for gamers.

Whats sad though is that even Creatives flagship ZS doing 3D hardware sound mixing is slower than an athlon64 doing the 3d sound mixing. :( Looks like I'm going to have to continue leaving the "Use Hardware Sound" options unchecked in the games I play.

unless I use EAX

Tricky - Dear God
Tricky's cover of a Sarah McLaughlin original

Dear God is an XTC original. Sarah McLaughlin did a cover, and Tricky's cover is of XTC's original, not Sarah McLaughlin's cover.

Fix it.

Another well written article by the TR gang,

But the only conclusions that came out in my mind is to look for the audigy 2 as my next sound card purchase. It sounds decent and is less expensive than the poorer performing M-Revolution card, and only 10 dollars more expensive than the Phillips card, go figure. I wish VIA would implement some hardware channels to really compete with Creative or even Nvidia on the motherboard front.

#13, its not evil, works well, even TR liked it:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2003q1/soundcards/index.x?pg=14

I also worked for Hercules, so I may be biased :)

EP

Given the abysmal perf in the RightMark testing... any chance some of the Q-sound items were staying on even though you turned them off in the control panel? Might be worth while to find a generic Envy driver, see if it'll take on the Phillups, and run the test again to see if it really is THAT far off the mark.

Mayhaps drop the output level slightly as well? They may not have enough padding on the inputs.

Quite interesting how a soundcard can drag you down so much in gaming performance. Makes chosing a soundcard a no-brainer, IMHO.

Philips? I had one of their Acoustic Edges before upgrading to my M-Audio Revolution. I loved it, but it never worked perfectly after XP was released and I upgraded - I would occasionally get pops and clicks in games, and if I installed the wrong version driver, I would get frequent bluescreens.

I wonder how long they're planning on supporting this new card, it's empty space has been on their PC sound mini-site for a long time...

Oh, hey, look, they have a WindowsXP driver for the Acoustic Edge as of May. I would just like to say that that's the first driver update in over 2 years.

If only there was a way to bolt hardware audio onto the side of this card, I might open the purse a bit.