Aureal redefines focus, sets 3-D audio technology

Electronic News, March 3, 1997 by Andrew MacLellan

Fremont, Calif.--Aureal Semiconductor--formerly Media Vision Technology--has emerged from the back end of a plan to redefine the company's technology focus and today will report that its new 3-D positional audio algorithm will debut in products from Diamond Multimedia and Oak Technology.

Aureal's A3D positional sound, developed in large part by wholly-owned subsidiary Crystal River Engineering, will today feature in separate introductions the OTI-610 PCI audio chip from Oak and the Diamond Monster Sound PCI-based accelerator card.

Additionally, Aureal is reporting wide support for A3D from game developers, including Activision, Electronic Arts, LucasArts, Maxis and Virgin Interactive, and expects titles incorporating the algorithm to hit store shelves this month.

The Oak audio controller is said to deliver multiple audio channels when combined with Microsoft's DirectSound API for playback of music, special effects and positional 3-D audio. The chip incorporates PCI bus mastering for automatic audio data transfers from system memory, simultaneously reducing system overhead and increasing the amount of sustained data which can be transferred over the bus at a given time. PCI also eliminates the need for separate, dedicated memory for audio functions.

The Diamond Monster Sound also supports Microsoft's DirectX APIs under Windows 95. The board is capable of up to 24 independent audio streams and a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 80 decibels. Both the Oak and Diamond devices will support Microsoft's impending release of DirectSound 3D as well.

Diamond and Oak separately licensed Aureal's A3D technology last year as part of a program which now includes Rockwell International and Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) among others (EN, Sept. 9, 1996). In fact, Diamond has integrated the A3D algorithm into an ADI 2181 DSP to guarantee the 40-million operations-per-second computing power required to achieve true positional sound.

"The licensing is coming to fruition," said Toni Schneider, Aureal's VP of strategic alliances. "The first licensees are shipping product and from our perspective we've been heavily evangelizing A3D to game developers."

Diamond's director of marketing Paul Nahi said Aureal was chosen over competing audio houses such as SRS Labs or QSound Labs because it was the first to market with a true psycho-acoustic technology which incorporated a head related transfer function (HRTF) algorithm with atmospheric absorption, Doppler shifts and inter-aural sound properties.

Priced at $199.95, the Monster Sound board, like the OTI-610, will enable 3-D audio over a pair of conventional speakers or headphones, although the Diamond device features quad-speaker capability as well. Diamond also incorporates a proprietary Freedom 5600 multimedia ASIC to connect the host PC to the DSP and audio CODEC components it licensed from ADI.

Unlike technology coming from the likes of VLSI Technology and S3, Diamond's Mr. Nahi said the Monster Sound card will not include Sound Blaster backwards compatibility. Rather, the new card is designed to sit on the PCI bus and ride alongside the ISA bus-compliant Sound Blaster device, not replace it.

"First of all, legacy compatibility over the PCI bus doesn't really work. It's kludgey (sic) and you only get about an 80 percent hit rate," said Mr. Nahi. "And most people who will use this device in the next 18 months already have a Sound Blaster. But the real issue is with legacy compatibility on a PCI bus."

Because the Monster Sound card sits side-by-side with older FM synthesis cards, the device can, however, exploit the audio functions of DOS-based games running on the Windows 95 platform, he added. The accelerator board and software bundle will be available through retailers next month, and future software upgrades over Diamond's web site may be possible through the card's programmable DSP.