ThunderBirds Are Flying

Electronic News, Nov 23, 1998

VLSI readies audio ICs

Las Vegas--VLSI Technology rolled out two members of the ThunderBird PCI audio IC family at Fall Comdex '98, here, offering what the company claims is high performance 3-D audio at a low cost.

VLSI is offering two versions of the ThunderBird PCI audio family: the SD and Q3D versions. The ThunderBird SD features 3-D audio processing low-end multimedia PCs through a small footprint and a lower OEM selling price than the ThunderBird Q3D that is targeted at high end systems. The ThunderBird Q3D offers what the company claims is the first independent audio accelerator offering EAX standards compatibility and stereo-to-quad conversion from PC software, music CD, DVD and MIDI signal sources.

The two additional members to the ThunderBird family join the ThunderBird 128 audio accelerator introduced earlier this year. The 'Q3D IC has already found its way into the Aztech PCI 368DSP PC sound card introduced also at Comdex. The 'SD and 'Q3D are sampling with production scheduled to begin in 1Q99 priced at $5.85 and $8.90, respectively, in OEM quantities.

VLSI is pitting the ThunderBird SD to address the sub-$1,000 market trying avoid the pitfalls that have made that market known for having poor audio quality. The company says the chip exceeds the performance of higher priced competitive chips while maintaining a low cost by trimming the number of available concurrently processed audio data. The ThunderBird Q3D is headed for the high end where an audio chip must have features in order to run DVD, multimedia, digital TV and home theater content on their PC. Audio is also essential for the PC gamer who usually will pay for a higher-priced audio device if the quality is right.