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According to the box, this little thingy can work miracles with your ears. A pair of speakers or headphones and some nifty programming are all part and parcel. Even though I've always been skeptical of these kinds of things this baby sure does what it claims to do. For those of you that aren't familiar with the A3D sound bit yet I'll try to explain it. By filtering sound, depending on how the origin relates, to the player in terms of direction (on all three axis) and distance the onboard sound processor produces a credible 3D experience in real time with just two actual sound sources (unlike true surround systems which use 4+ speakers).
3D audio is truly the next step in the evolution of 3D gaming and so far we've just scratched the surface, all avid gamers know what difference sound makes in terms of setting the mood and overall increasing the gaming experience. Being able to track objects moving and locating unseen objects with your ears is something that we all have to recognize as an incredible benefit - especially in first person shooters like Quake II and Unreal (the latter actually has A3D & EAX support and hence is one of the bigger attractions at the moment). Today the Vortex and Aureal's A3D is as close as we get to a standard in 3D audio, currently being challenged by Creative Labs and their Sound Blaster Live and EAX - Environmental Audio. But, looking at the specs on the second generation of Aureal based boards the Sound Blaster Live is going to face some much sterner competition.
OK, enough rambling, let's get back to the Magic3D Sound. As we have established by now it's basically a cheap and good all-round board but it of course does more than 3D sound - let's just have a run-through of the features and leave it at that.
· DirectSound 3D and A3D support for 3D audio, support up to 8 3D streams
· Accelerates DirectSound through hardware mixing of 20+ channels
· PCI Plug n Play for easy installation
· Support mixing and playback at up to 48Khz for crisp audio
· 32/32 Wavetable (32 Hardware and 32 Software voices, uses high quality samples stored on the host computer)
· Plays 20+ simultaneous audio streams under Win9x
· Sound Blaster Pro emulation for old DOS titles (kinda sucky though)
· Goes for around $69 which isn't half-bad.
On a note the Magic3D Sound oddly enough doesn't have Full Duplex support. Very odd.
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