2D Quality Analysis

Bright, but not overly so

The brighter sound may be preferred, depending on musical preferences. Some "bright" sounding systems then to sound harsh and painful at high volumes. This was not the case with the Canyon 3D. I credit some of this fidelity to the Burr-Brown Digital to Analog converters that our board used. Although I don't know the entire history of Burr-Brown, I do know that when looking for high-end D/A converters, companies turn to Burr-Brown.

Many of Sony's ES line of CD Players use Burr-Brown. That said, using Burr-Brown parts doesn't make a product superior, as most companies make a spectrum of components ranging from the very best to only average. In comparison to other sound cards, however, the Canyon 3D is among the best.

Accuracy is only one component to good 2D audio; you also want good stereo separation, while at the same time you don't want to hear the position of each speaker. Here, the Canyon 3D sounded very similar to the Vortex2 cards. There was good separation and detail in both channels. Good sound cards can generate an immersive 3D sound stage even with only 2 speakers and music; the Canyon 3D earns a spot with these cards.

Premature Drivers

What was very startling was the Canyon3D's inability to playback multiple simultaneous sounds, something that all PCI cards have already addressed. You can forget about hearing your "Incoming Mail" alert while you are listening some music. ESS reassured us that this was due to the pre-release state of the Canyon3D we were testing:

Regarding the multiple Windows audio streams, our WDM driver will support it, our VxD doesn't. We could change our VxD, but since the world is moving to WDM on July 1, we're waiting for that.

I would expect excellence multi-channel support from ESS as they have already implemented, very well, 32 simultaneous 3D hardware voices, as shown in ZD's Audio Winbench.