The Aureal Booth

The Aureal Booth

Aureal had one of the better booth setups at the show. With DVD movies and Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament deatmatches, it was the booth to visit for killing free time. The highlight of their booth was the recently announced SQ3500 Turbo sound card. Here are the specs:

• Aureal Vortex2 AU8830 chip
• 100MHz Motorola DSP56362
• Full-duplex, 48kHz digital recording and playback
• A3D 3.0 acceleration
• Dolby Digital hardware decoder
• Studio Quality reverb
• Sample rate conversion with 27-point interpolation
• A3D 2.0 acceleration (16 streams with 60 wall reflections at 16-bit 48kHz)
• A3D 1.0 acceleration (76 streams)
• DirectSound3D acceleration (76 streams)
• DirectSound acceleration (92 streams)
• Professional 576-voice synthesizer
• Reverb and effects (Chorus, delay, flange, distortion, wah-wah, and more)
• General MDIDI and DLS support
• 4MB and 8MB of professional studio samples
• Signal-to-noise ratio: 98dB Typical
• Frequency response: 20Hz-20kHz
• Input/Output Connectors
• Bracket Connectors
• Line 1 output - front speakers
• Line 2 output - rear speakers
• Line input
• Microphone input
• Game/MIDI port
• Coaxial S/PDIF output
• Internal connectors (all MPC3)
• CD input
• Auxiliary input
• TAD (modem) input/output
  Compatibility
• A3D 3.0, 2.0, and 1.0
• EAX support
• Microsoft DirectSound, DirectSound3D, and DirectInput
• Sound Blaster Pro support
• Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 compatible
• MS-DOS (Windows DOS box) compatible

Before you start dreaming of experiencing 5.1 sound on your PC with the 3500 Turbo I regret to inform you that the SQ3500 Turbo isn't the same 5.1 solution you'd experience in a home theater system.