Aureal
Vortex2 SQ2500 Quad PCI review
Posted by Adam
Klein on February 15, 2000 - Page 3/5
Company: Aureal
Product: Vortex2
SQ2500 Quad PCI soundcard
In
the box & Bundle
Looking
at the box it came in; I noticed something that made me do a
double take. It says; “Based on technology developed for
NASA, A3D delivers an immersive audio experience via
headphones or two or more speakers.” If A3D is originally
the audio standard at NASA, then this board must be good.
This is obviously put there to get the end users attention
when buying the product, but Aureal boards have proven in
the past to be very compatible boards that run just about
anything plus they have the best 3D audio made.
The
card comes with a pretty good software bundle. While it’s
rare to even have software to come with video boards, Aureal
has included two full games and one OEM game.
One
of my favorites is Drakan, which I also reviewed a while ago
and Heretic II, a good game that should have done better in
sales than it did. The OEM game is Slave Zero. You get only
a couple of levels of play, but that’s enough of the game
to turn me off to buying the full version.
The
software bundle also includes Aureal Vortex Player, Flatland
Rover and 3DML, Future Beat 3D, MIDI Orchestrator 32 and
AudioView 32. The Vortex Player is just your normal multiple
format audio player. It’s able to play formats from CD to
MP3s to WAVs.
The
Flatland software lets you view Internet 3DML code, which is
something I haven’t seen yet. Future Beat 3D lets you edit
music and place instruments in 3D space. The MIDI
Orchestrator allows you to playback MIDI format music. I don’t
really care too much about MIDI anymore though, but it’s
nice to know that Aureal has a utility to play them.
Finally,
there’s the AudioView 32 software. This is much like
Creative’s Wave Studio. It allowed you to edit any WAV
file.
Features
As
most of you know, the SQ2500 uses the popular A3D API.
Included with the SQ2500 and its drivers are A3D version
2.0. This driver is what creates the true 3D audio that
Vortex 2 is able to produce. Of course the SQ2500 is
backward compatible with A3D version 1 and also includes
support for Microsoft’s DirectX APIs, such as DirectSound
and DirectSound 3D.
On
the back of the card, there is support for two analog and
one digital output to speakers. The two analogs are the
front and back. You can use these two connections for
four-point audio, which is becoming a very popular audio
experience for PC owners.
You
can really tell the difference when playing games. For
example, shooting your gun in a FPS then hearing the shell
bounce off the ground behind you is a really awesome
experience that can only be experienced with four point
audio.
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