Aureal One Of Shrinking Pool Of PCI Audio Firms

Electronic News, August 10, 1998

Fremont, Calif. -- Continuing to hold onto its position as one of the last in a shrinking group of PCI audio chipmakers, Aureal Semiconductor late last week introduced the Vortex 2 PCI audio processor targeted at next generation audio applications in desktop PCs.

The fledgling PCI audio chip market has been narrowed to approximately half a dozen competitors struggling to make a living creating, manufacturing and proliferating PCI audio chips. The market has thinned out after a less than stellar acceptance of PCI audio devices. PC OEMs chose instead to continue to use lower-cost ISA-based audio devices.

However, with the release of Microsoft's PC'99 specifications, and its DirectSound APIs calling for PC OEMs to incorporate PCI-based audio devices next year, the PCI audio market could again be heating up.

To ensure the company is there if and when the going gets good, Aureal introduced its next generation audio chip. The new Aureal Vortex 2 chip features a 320-voice DLS wavetable engine for DirectMusic and MIDI, a hardware DirectSound engine, legacy audio support, crosstalk cancellation, 96 DMA channels and full MIDI I/O and DirectX game-port acceleration.

Vortex 2 is also optimized for headphone, two-speaker or multi-speaker playback and hardware-based 10-band stereo graphics equalizer that maintains a signal-to-noise ratio of 96 decibels, the company said. Aureal also said the device is specifically dedicated toward processing the A3D 2.0 positional 3-D audio technology, also developed by Aureal

The Vortex 2 is sampling and is slated for production before the end of the year with pricing to be announced at that time.

The device operates at 3.3-volts with 5V tolerant I/O and is manufactured on a 0.35-micron process. Aureal said the PCI-bus chip is compliant with the AC'97 codec specification, PC'98 compliant. Aureal noted that the Vortex 2 will double the performance of the original Vortex chip introduced last year. The device supports Aureal's A3D 2.0 with a 64-source hardware-based wavetracing engine, or the ability to add wall reflections and occlusions to model the acoustic characteristics of an environment.