Specifications

Tech Specs

From the Aureal SQ2500 specification list:

Full-duplex, 48kHz digital recording and playback
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)
Synthesizer Professional 576-voice wavetable synthesizer
Reverb and effects (chorus, delay, flange, distortion, wah-wah, and more)
General MIDI and DLS support
4MB of professional studio samples

Audio Specs

SNR: >98dB Typical
Frequency Response: 20Hz-20kHz (-3dB intercept)

Input/Output Connectors

Line 1 output - front speakers
Line 2 output - rear speakers
Line input (analog line-level input)
Microphone input
Game/MIDI port (standard 15-pin D connector)
Coaxial S/PDIF output

Internal connectors (all MPC3)
CD input
Auxiliary input
TAD (modem) input/output

Compatibility

A3D 1.0 & 2.0
Microsoft DirectSound, DirectSound3D, and DirectInput
Sound Blaster Pro support Windows 95/98/NT4.0 MS-DOS

Notes

The main new feature we see here is the coaxial S/PDIF output. Most Vortex2 cards only offer the coaxial S/PDIF output on a separate daughter card, but the Aureal card has it on-board. Other cards such as Xitel's Platinum Storm only have on-board optical (TOSLINK) S/PDIF output. The coaxial output offers greater compatibility with consumer electronics equipment. This makes sense considering that the whole point behind the digital out on a consumer level sound card is to be able to output a line to an external AC-3 decoder.

We also noticed that the SQ2500's >98dB signal to noise ratio is 1-3dB better than that of other Vortex2 sound cards.