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Whaaaaat?

A3D was two things: an API and an algorithm for positioning a sound in 3D space. The API was essentially the same as Microsoft's DirectSound 3D, which is still used today. The difference, at the time, was the addition of a handful of functions to deal with the fact that Aureal's acceleration was in hardware, which was unsupported by DirectX at the time. These were particularly required due to the fact that the early 3D audio hardware supported an extremely limited number of 3D channels.

Fast forward to the modern era, and you will find some things have changed. Microsoft's software 3D audio rendering takes a much, much smaller slice of the CPU due to faster processors. Microsoft (since DX5) has allowed hardware acceleration to DS3D, utterly obsoleting A3D as an API. Sensaura (recently purchased by Creative) has licensed their 3D positional audio algorithms to a large number of sound card and motherboard companies. Guillemot, Creative, I/O Magic, NVidia, Terratec, Philips, and other companies have continued to make sound cards (and chipsets) with various levels of hardware and software 3D positional audio.

These days it's more difficult to tell where the hardware ends and the software begins due to motherboard design issues.

But if you've been listening to stereo since Aureal went out of business, it's not your soundcard's fault.

Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA

" Needless to say, my next soundcard is a Philips. "

Been there, done that.

I paid $150 for 'em, from EMS Computing. They've got great sound, really nice quality speakers, and a huge sub. This things does 53 watts RMS per channel, and 200 watts RMS on the sub. Great speakers if you don't wanna fork out $400 for Klipsch 5.1 speakers. If you're lookin' for a review, here's a great, really detailed review of the speakers.

They have an excellent website: good selection, well laid out, good navingation tools (View by name, View By Price, include tax etc.) and good ordering system. They have good prices and very reasonable (my last order €8 on ~1½ kg) shipping charges which importantly is with DHL Express (2 days), so you can track your shipment on the DHL website (which is brilliant - I've been stuck in limbo several times not knowing when or if a shipment will arrive when buying from other retailers like dabs.com). And no I don't work for Komplett, just a happy customer.

As many others have said it will probably not be cheaper when you build your first machine but you will get higher quality parts. What this means is that when it comes time to upgrade (in 9-12 months) you only need to upgrade part of your system (say, only motherboard, processor, memory and graphics card). Also having bought quality parts any you upgrade can still continue to have a useful life as a server or SO's machine.

If you are going to build your own machine you do need to do your homework. Overview sites like http://www.arstechnica.com/, http://www.sharkyextreme.com are useful but don't always get it right. I find component/area focused wesites invaluable. Here are some good examples: http://www.motherboards.org/ , http://www.3dsoundsurge.com/ , http://storagereview.com/

Also a good idea is to lurk for a while in some of the product newsgroups / online forums.

One thing that you should not forget is that building your own PC is a lot of fun! It's interesting, satisfying and educational. So in the long run I think that it is both cheaper and more rewarding.

Here

IMO, there are better choices than the audigy, such as the Turtle Beach SantaCruz and the Philips Acoustic Edge.

As well, the Audigy is NOT 24bit!! you only get 24bit when outputing via SPDIF.

As for those who say not many can tell the difference between sound cards, mabe they should use some real speakers/headphones instead of thos "Multimedia" speakers that came with the
system that cost mabe $0.50 to make.

EAX is not like A3D. EAX is reverb. A3D was a proprietary API and hardware for 3D positional audio. In computer games. Implemented on sound cards. It makes me feel like a rebel to cheer for the underdog, too, but I think we should be fighting for open standards, not just turnover among proprietary corporate initiatives. PS: I could have sworn we were talking about MP3 players anyway. Chris Owens
San Carlos, CA