Diamond's Debut

Enter Diamond, a company whose bread and butter used to be 2D Windows accelerators. From their success, they've grown tremendously, blossoming into every other facet of the desktop PC world - from video and 3d cards to SCSI controllers, to modems, motherboards, and now even mice wireless LAN setups. They've also established a strong foothold in the PC audio sector with the emergence of the Monster Sound series of sound cards, the first big name product to harness the power of the PCI bus and 3D positional sound. The MX300 is the fourth Monster Sound product, and Diamond's 2nd generation product, arriving just in time to catch the train and compete directly with the Sound Blaster Live!

Being the new guy isn't easy. It usually means you have to innovate and come up with an "edge" that the big guys haven't caught on to yet. Diamond found this edge with Aureal's A3D API, capable of rendering realistic 3D audio on a standard set of stereo speakers or headphones. The original Monster Sound was released in mid-1997 (beating Creative to the PCI punch by nearly a year), retailed for $200 and supported A3D 1.0 through two speakers or four speakers (using straight panning between the speakers like the SB Live currently does). Diamond then streamlined their technology and released two new Monster Sound products, the $99 budget-minded MX80, and the 4MB wavetable-equipped MX200, retailing for $149. Their newest, the MX300 is powered by Aureal's second-generation Vortex 2 chip, and offers more power than any of their previous products for $99. The big catch? You have to pay extra for their MX-LINK I/O card, which will be released separately and feature external connectors for digital in/out such as SPDIF, and an additional stereo output jack for 6-speaker support (talk about one-upmanship). This allows them to package a low-cost card with additional, less-used features offered as an option.

The connections on the Monster Sound MX300 are as follows: