Audio Fidelity

Audio Fidelity

Despite what Aureal, Creative, or Sensaura would like you to believe, 3D sound is not everything. You'll still want high fidelity 2D audio playback for listening to your huge MP3 collection… of CDs you own… or for games such as Quake3 which have not yet adopted any 3D audio support.

Sensaura's T-Shirt reads: "Beethoven was deaf. Unlucky." To test the quality of Canyon3D, I decided to take on their implicit challenge and decided to use classical piano music as my reference. Before you get worried, the primary reason I selected piano music to gauge the quality is that my ears are more sensitive to tonal differences for a piano note. If it's too high or too low, the piano is out of tune. Furthermore, accurate reproduction of piano notes would also suggest accurate reproduction of music in general.

The Test

I selected an MP3 of Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu Opus 66 and used Winamp 2.21, using the Fraunhoffer decoder and monitored it on a JBL PSW60 subwoofer and JBL Sat2 satellites attached to an amp with about 150 watts RMS to monitor the audio quality. On hand, I had a Diamond Monster Sound Original, a Yamaha WaveForce 192XG and Vortex2 for comparison.

Whoa, that's a lot of sound cards

Here, the Yamaha continued to amaze me as it seemed to produce the most accurate tone out of the three. The Canyon3D and Vortex2 were very clear, although the notes sounded slightly brighter than the Yamaha. The Monster Sound produced a slightly muddier, and lower sound. Though the Yamaha card was my personal favorite, the Canyon3D was still very competitive and the difference is a matter of personal preference.