burnaby t wallace

Only a select few of my readers will actually understand what that headline means.

I like to consider myself an audiophile. Everything that outputs audio has to sound good. Taken a ride in my car? Enjoying the rich warm audio of the Alpine system, are ya? Watched a movie in my house? The timbre of the instruments or the typical Michael Bay explosion surrounded your head, didn’t it? No? Well, you suck.

Anyhow, audio quality has long been something I have not skimped on. It’s the reason why I don’t really listen to FM radio (or, ohmygoodness, AM). No FM modulation, here, people. I am serious about audio. Imagine my sadness when the unit I wanted for my vehicle was only available with 2V of power to head to the off-board amplifiers? I was sad.

Well, take that audio anal-retentiveness and apply it to the computer.

Even as a young teen, I remember saving up all my allowance to get an optical board interface so I could record the music I had on my computer to my minidiscs. I even held on to the Athlon XP board amidst being surrounded by the 64-bit processors out there because the board that I was using had audio features not available on any higher performing board. Ah, good ol’nForce 2.

Well, I finally made the jump to the more powerful CPUs and motherboard, thanks to Auzentech. They made a sound card that tickled my fancy, and allowed me to convert my audio using an off-board processor–digitally, no less. Ultimately, my PC audio journey has forced me to move from a Creative Labs product to C-Media.

Some background.

Creative Labs products typically give the user more performance as the software (read: games) usually hands off a few tasks for the sound card to process. Plus, Creative Labs invented the EAX standard and EAX 3 (and above) is exclusive to them. C-Media has a processor that can take a stereo signal and convert it to multi-channel. On top of that, it allows that multi-channel signal to be sent digitally (over SPDIF) to an off-board processor. Unfortunately, it had a performance hit as much of the processing had to be done by the host CPU.

Why this is so cool, and what the acronyms mean.

Well, Auzentech is now coming out with a card that mixes all the great features of both companies (thanks to Creative Labs allowing third parties to license their technology).

The new sound card, called the Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1 takes the EAX environment technology, with the X-Fi processor (that means the ability to use Crystalizer technology, which restores detail to compressed audio) and adds Dolby Digital Live (DDL) and DTS Interactive, both technologies that can convert stereo to multi-channel, on the fly.

This is big, folks. Auzentech is doing something that is pretty unprecedented here. The pricing has not been announced yet.

You can read more here.

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