I think it's much better than Soundblaster Live
Written: Dec 16 '01 (Updated Mar 03 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent sound, good software utilities, EAX & 5.1 surround sound support
Cons: First card was bad, non-standard connectors, high cpu usage reported.
The Bottom Line: Great sounding card with modern Yamaha technology. May be problematic with windows 2000 or XP systems.
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| suemccartin's Full Review: Philips Acoustic Edge Sound Card |
I had seen this card for sale on several occasions and I always wondered about it. For me, the normal $99.00 price tag was a bit steep for a curiosity. I am always interested in other companies products besides Creative as I've seen their cards cause more than a few problems in non-Intel chipset motherboards. Recently my local Best Buy put the Acoustic Edge cards on clearance and they were down to $69.95 with a $20.00 rebate and that was finaly cheap enough for me to take the plunge and give it a try.
WHAT'S IN THE BOX? The box contains a driver/software cdrom disk, a nicely illustrated installation manual, warranty card, registration numbers, a copy of Power DVD (software DVD player software), the card itself, a cdrom audio cable and two special cables that plug into the back of the soundcard and provide input/output connections.
INSTALLATION STEPS:
1-I strongly recommend that you fully remove all traces of your old soundcard from windows before trying to install any new soundcard. The Creative Labs Soundblaster line of cards are notorious for leaving pieces of themselves all over your windows registry and causing problems. You should not only run the uninstaller available from the control panel, but also use "Regedit" (which windows does install on your harddrive somewhere) to do a search of your registry and delete all references to "Creative" in order to be completely sure that it's all gone.
After doing an uninstall and using regedit, run Regclean or some similar registry clean/repair utility to be sure that your registry is error free (at least as error free as it's possible to make it anyhow). Of course if you've never had a sound card in your system or you've just installed a fresh copy of windows then you shouldn't have any old drivers to worry about removing.
2-Open the case, unscrew and remove the old sound card and install the Acoustic Edge in a open PCI slot. PCI slots tend to be white in color and quite a bit shorter than ASA/ISA that tend to be quite long and black in color.
When choosing which slot to install your soundcard into, please avoid putting it into the PCI slot next to your AGP video card (smaller brown slot that is usually the first slot next to the power supply inside your case---you should be able to locate which card is your video card by observing where your monitor cable plugs in) if possible. In most motherboards, the PCI slot next to the AGP slot will automatically share resources with the the video card, which can be a bad thing on some systems. If you have a lightly configured system (with not many cards) it's a good idea to try to have hardware pieces using their own resources and not sharing an IRQ (IRQ=Interrupt. Most systems have 5,9,10,11, available for use by your add on toys. If you've got a USB printer and don't use your serial ports you can disable the serial/parallel ports in your motherboard bios and also free up 3,4,7 for use).
Windows is designed to allow hardware to share resources, however, not all hardware made by different manufactures will work well when sharing resources with something else and so it should be avoided if at all possible. Don't forget to install the screw in the card to hold it in place.
3-Internal connectors: CD IN, AUX IN, TAD, Digital CD IN. The CD IN is self explanatory, if you want to play standard audio cd's on your system you must connect this cable from the back of your cdrom to the soundcard. AUX IN is a second connector like CD IN and should accept either a cable from a second cdrom or from some other device such as a TV card. TAD is designed to allow a compatible analog modem (with a TAD plug) to connect to your soundcard for speakerphone applications. Digital CD IN, while most cdrom drives have this plug I guess I just don't really see the reason for it and I've never used it. Perhaps some audiophile out there can explain to me the advantages of using this connector but I for one have never used it. According to the documentation in the manual, if you connect to this jack SPDIF IN on the input cable becomes unavailable.
4-Close up the case. Insert the special DIN cables in the back of the soundcard according to the instructions in the book. Make sure you have them aligned properly and don't try to force these to seat on the card; they are delicate.
One cable is for inputs, and one cable is for your speakers. The card also provides a line-in plug, a microphone plug, and a joystick port on the back. If you've just got standard, non-5.1 speakers your back speakers plug into the black connector of the output cable and your front speakers plug into the green connector. If you have an item such as a tv card in your system then it probably has a cable that goes from its output plug to the input plug on the soundcard (you may be limited to where you can put the card by the length of that cable so observe before you install the card).
Note that some internal devices that need an audio plug will provide a plug similar to the cdrom audio input that can be connected to the soundcard internally. The Philips Acoustic edge does provide a internal AUX connector that could possibly accept the input from your tv card or a second cdrom in your system case. (Note: I read on a newsgroup that the AUX connector may not be standard, I'll post more when I know for sure whether a special cable is needed to use the AUX connector on the card.)
5-Boot your computer and insert the driver disk when requested. If everything installs properly, great, check all your settings (if you don't have 5.1 speakers set those options as it defaults to 5.1 setups) and enjoy a great sounding card.
PROBLEMS SOME PEOPLE ARE HAVING: The first card I brought home froze the system when it got to the point of installing the driver. It did this on two different systems. WWW.Neoseeker.com has a forum dedicated to questions about this card and I went there for troubleshooting information. There are apparently more than a few bad cards floating around and most people who encounter the freeze problem are saying that a new card was necessary to fix the problem (i.e. it wasn't anything in their system or anything that they were doing). It held true for me because the second card I got works great.
The second issue that people are talking about with this card involves Windows 2000 and also some strange noises being produced through the speakers.
The third comment people are making about the card is that under certain conditions it is a cpu hog. I.e. if you have a utility that watches cpu usage enabled it seems to show that the Acoustic Edge needs a lot of cpu time. The moral is, don't try to put this card on a machine that is any slower than about 600 mhz, your system probably won't be able to handle it. As drivers are perfected perhaps some of this issue will be resolved. There is always some kind of trade off for quality and in the case of this card that may be the price being paid.
NOISES: This card uses a DMA channel (Direct Memory Access) to move data on the motherboard. On some systems, a clicking noise can be heard during hard drive access (because the hard drive controller is also using DMA to move data). The cure for the clicking problem has varied according to the system and if you run into this you may have to try several cures before you find the right one for your system. The soundblaster Live cards also are reported to have this problem occasionally. The three most common solutions to this matter are:
1-a motherboard bios update (if you don't know how to do this, get some help as you can render your system inoperable if you don't do this properly).
2-make sure the card isn't sharing an IRQ with another device.
3-turn off ACPI (power management services) in your motherboard bios. (WARNING: doing this could prevent Windows from starting up so take this step with caution. You may have to reinstall windows without ACPI being active in the bios to get everything working with ACPI services disabled in windows.
WINDOWS 2000 issues: Windows 2000 is more like windows NT than windows 95. It requires special drivers for hardware and is not really designed for gamers, it's a business operating system that's designed for stability and represents Microsofts steps away from the code used in 95/98/ME. There are scores of devices built for Windows 95/98 that just don't work well with 2000 because the drivers are not yet up to par. This card is no exception, I take it the Windows 2000 drivers are still troublesome for this card.
MY OBSERVATIONS OF THE SOUND PRODUCED BY THIS CARD AS COMPARED TO MY OLD SOUNDBLASTER LIVE (NOT 5.1 VERSION):
I constantly play the game Diablo II online. The music in the game is top notch and there is also a lot of dialog and environmental effects such as rain, crickets chirping, thunderstorms, different sounds for different items that drop when monsters die, etc. With this card in the system I often catch myself looking out the window to see if it's raining outside...it's just that realistic.
I've always found that on the soundblaster live I couldn't always hear the voice tracks clearly and I never thought the positional audio really worked well (but maybe that was just my cheap speakers too). Even though I could tell that the Live was trying to position audio properly according to the direction the sound was supposed to be coming from, I really think the Acoustic Edge does a much better job of accomplishing that end. With this card you can really hear that the monster sneaking up on you from the right is coming from that direction and it does a great job of giving you a true impression of just how close the enemy is! I have a four speaker system (not 5.1) and even on my cheapie speakers the difference in the sound is unbelievable. In all fairness the Creative Live is several years old and the Acoustic Edge is the latest Yamaha processor so I would naturally expect it to sound better than the live.
I really like this card. I've yet to try recording anything from an audio source but from what I've read on the newsgroups you really have to spend a great deal more money to get any more performance in that arena. For those of us that just want to move our old tapes or lp's to cdrom this card provides plenty of performance that will please all but the most picky audiophiles. (I'll post again when I have a chance to try making recordings.)
The results I've seen with my cheapie speakers makes me wonder what it can do if I invest in a set of 5.1 surround speakers...hmmmm.
I like the fact that the card utilities allow you to do quite a lot to adjust the way the sound reproduces. Like the soundblaster live you get a screen that will test your speakers (note it also tests the center channels if you have 5.1 speakers) and lets you adjust front rear fade, treble and bass and set such special attributes as reverb (echo), etc. Like the soundblaster live it allows you to easily set environmental settings such as "stone wall" and "carpeted hallway" which changes the way the sound is output.
COMPATIBILITY: Thank goodness there probably aren't too many DOS games left that people actually play. The box advertises soundblaster pro compatibility in DOS or DOS box under windows. I haven't tried any dos games so I really can't tell you how well compatibility mode works. I can tell you that most dos games want the soundcard on IRQ 5 or they will not use it, this can be a problem if your card doesn't install there and I've yet to see a soundblaster compatibility mode that really works on non-creative cards.
The Acoustic Edge box lists DirectSound, DirectSound 3D, DirectInput, EAX 2.0, and A3D 1.0 as being understood by this card. Because of the design of modern PCI soundcards most do not offer hardware support for these standards, it's software only and so support can be upgraded with driver updates.
I LIKE IT!
UPDATE 3-2002: I've recently upgraded to windows XP. This card installed the first time and hasn't given me any problems yet that I'm aware of. The windows XP drivers appear to work just fine for this card.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 49.00
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suemccartin
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Location: Florida, USA
Reviews written: 291
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About Me:
Been building computers for 10+ years. I work to support my computer habit.
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