Philips started with pointing out that even though they have been a major force for years in the consumer audio market they just recently entered the multimedia market. With their first take being the DSS (later USB) speaker systems in 1997. As you all know the USB speaker systems never become the major success Philips and Microsoft thought they would be and while Philips think this will start to change, their current speaker line-up for the most part consists of speakers with traditional analog inputs. More about this later. When it comes to soundcards Philips entry into the market is even more recent, with the first cards appearing in the fall of 2000 in US and this year in Europe. They were eager to get any feedback and suggestions for what they could improve

Quickly following this more humble opening, compared to the recent Creative Labs Press event I attended, Philips changed tone and made it clear that they intend to be the market leader. This includes the soundcard market where Creative is completely dominating the retail market. Philips is already number #2 in the US retail market with 12%, enough to be clearly ahead of other competitors like Hercules and Turtle Beach. With the retail market they refer specifically to sales of sound cards sold separately directly to the consumer and not to PCs sold at retail which include a soundcard. Speaking of the PC OEM market they will now start to focus more energy on this market than they did the first year. As result they expect the most rapid growth in the near future to be in the PC OEM add-in soundcard market. This is where Turtle Beach has had most of their success by the way. Philips expects to do even better in Europe, since Creative Labs’ lock on the European market is not as strong as in the US.

Philips of course doesn’t expect to become the market leader over night but they feel they are in a very strong position with far better resources than anyone else, including Creative Labs, thanks to being a major player in the consumer electronics market. When they talked about resources they were mostly referring to technical ones, not marketing ones. That is, more research labs and IP (Intellectual Property). The research labs have of course as primary target the consumer electronics market but in many cases what’s useful to enhance the audio experience in the living room will do the same in whatever room you placed your PC.

Now it’s worth noting that while financial resources was the major reason Aureal failed, financial and technical resources are certainly no guarantee for success. If it were then Intel would be the dominant player in the graphics card market, not nVidia. Just like Nvidia in the graphics market I believe Creative has one other strength over Philips beyond being the current market leader and that is they live and die on their success in this market.

Philips soundcard line up in both Europe and US includes Acoustic Edge (PSC706), Seismic Edge (PSC705) and Rhythmic Edge (PSC703). All use the same chip and use similar drivers with support for EAX 1.0/2.0, DS3D and A3D 1.0 as well as QSound technologies like QMSS, QXpander and QSurround. The only major differences are the connectivity and software bundle. In case of connectivity all offer S/PDIF output but only the Acoustic Edge offers S/PDIF input. The Acoustic Edge also has a separate S/PDIF output where as the other cards share the center/sub output with the S/PDIF out jack.

Moving on to the analog outputs, both the Seismic and Acoustic Edge offer 5.1 output while the Rhythmic Edge offers only 4-speaker output. In case of software the major difference currently is that only the Acoustic Edge includes PowerDVD 3.0. Later this year they will also include different game bundles with the Acoustic Edge including Rage Software’s Offroad (known as Redneck Racing in US), Icewind Dale and Giants. The Seismic Edge will only include Giants. The game bundle will be the same in US and Europe.

In the US Philips also just recently have introduced a new 2-channel card using ESS Allegro chip, which is powered by Sensaura instead of QSound. Last years Seismic Edge (PSC704) and Rhythmic Edge (PSC702) will not be introduced in Europe and have been discontinued in US. You can find more details on the cards on Philips site.

The major focus on the soundcard presentation delivered by Scott McNeese (Senior Product Marketing Manager) was on QSound’s QMSS, which is unique to Philips soundcards (PSC706, PSC705, PSC704 and PSC703). As a side note it can be interesting to know it has previously been available in some cards based on VLSI’s (acquired by Philips in 1999) now discontinued Thunderbird Q3D chip. Philips clearly hinted they got exclusive rights to QMSS in the soundcard market even though they refused to comment on the specifics of their QSound licensing contract. They did however say they (already back in the VLSI days) did work very closely with QSound on the QMSS technology and continue to do so in further developing it.

So what exactly is this QMSS technology? It can be described as a type of stereo expansion for 4 or 5.1 speakers. While the exact details for how it works were not disclosed by Philips or QSound, Scott McNeese offered for the first time some general details on how it works. It’s basically trying to do the reverse to the down-mixing of Dolby Digital 5.1 to stereo. The effect can be very impressive for not only music but also games and movies. While the positioning won’t be perfect, I and others have found it to often do an amazingly good job in both games and movies on placing the sound effects that should be behind you in the rear speakers and in case of movies also placing the vocals in the center speaker. In fact some find it to be better than true Dolby Digital 5.1 for movies due to placing more of the sound effects in the rear speakers.

While Philips several times stated they don’t consider QMSS to compete with Dolby they do think QMSS is often a better option than Dolby Digital 5.1 for home environments. The reason is that movie sound designers are careful to not place too much in the rear speakers to not ruin the experience for people sitting far closer to the rear than the front speakers in a movie theatre.

Scott McNeese also briefly covered other features of the soundcards including QXpander (2-speaker stereo expansion), QSurround (virtual surround sound with 2-speakers), 3D positioning (Q3D) in DS3D/A3D games and their support for EAX 1.0 / 2.0. All these technologies are done by QSound and unlike QMSS all of them with the notable exception of QSurround are present in the latest drivers for cards using ForteMedia’s FM801 chip.

Drivers

Drivers are usually completely ignored during product demonstrations even though poor driver quality is most certainly the number one customer complaint in the PC market. Philips did the unusual by mentioning drivers but it was only to point out they already released WHQL certified Windows XP OEM drivers. Retail drivers based on these WHQL drivers but with more features will be available in the next week or so from their website. Speaking of their PC sound website they mentioned it will be redesigned do a better job on also covering the European market from now on.

When I got the chance to speak about drivers issues Philips admitted developing drivers for Windows 2000 have had been a pain but it was still possible to develop well working drivers in the OS. They also, as with most if not all other companies, pointed out that the major issue with driver development was to make it work on all systems. Scott said they had high hopes that the more public beta testing of the Windows XP drivers (available from our site) would improve the compatibility beyond what in house beta testing had done in the past. It’s not that they consider their older drivers to be any worse than their competitors, rather they are just admitting it has not been perfect nor will it likely ever be.

Pure software solutions or moving the hardware outside of the box are two other solutions to offer better compatibility since many of today’s issues are IRQ related. Scott also reported that many PC OEMs point out that swapping PCI slots when installing new cards was one common trigger for all sorts of soundcard related problems to occur. When on the subject of drivers it can be worth noting that despite what some users with problems with soundcard drivers think, Bill Gates recently said graphics card drivers are clearly the ones that behaves worse with no one really offering good quality drivers today.

Philips never offered any comments on the competition during the formal presentations but during the more informal dinner conversions I managed to get Scott McNeese’s opinion of some of the features Creative Labs and nVidia touts as major. Starting with Creative Labs pride, EAX Advanced HD, Scott didn’t seem very concerned that Philips’ cards lack of support for the new features of this API would turn out to be a major issue. While he did agree that some of the features like morphing and more than one environmental effect were nice, he considered them fairly minor relative to taking full advantage of what’s already in EAX 2.0. That’s something he found almost no game did with Soldier of Fortune being one of few that used occlusion at all.

He had similar comments about Sensaura’s ZoomFX (see Sensaura article for details). The key to get more games to take advantage of EAX 2.0 is better tools if we should believe Scott McNeese, who obviously don’t think Creative Labs Eagle is enough. Having said that he did say they may in the future introduce their own extensions to DS3D but didn’t offer any specifics on what that could be.

We definitely agree that few games take full advantage of EAX 2.0 including occlusion and obstructions. All the ones we are aware of that do, with the possible exception of Rogue Spear, have really been done by Creative Labs themselves. Having said that I do find some of greater control of the reverb available in EAX 2.0 compared to EAX 1.0 has been taken advantage of in more games. At least I think that’s the case since EAX 2.0 games in general offer more impressive use of reverb than EAX 1.0 ones. I wouldn’t rule out that the added features in EAX Advanced HD (also often referred to as EAX 3.0) will be enough for developers to start Creative Labs Eagle development tool and then also take advantage of occlusion and obstruction while they are at it. Now if the Eagle tool works as Creative says it should then this should also benefit EAX 2.0 only cards like Philips, several Sensaura based ones and Creative Labs own Live. We have yet to see any game use EAX Advanced HD though.

Moving on to another key point of Creative Labs feature list, AC3 decoding in the drivers, Philips think their bundling of PowerDVD 3.0 (only Acoustic Edge) is a better option. In case of playing DVD movies the benefit of actually including the entire package is of course obvious but it’s for the playback of AC3 soundtracks and not for watching DVD movies Creative Labs included AC3 decoding. Creative Labs thinks, just like Aureal did, that many games will start to include a DD 5.1 soundtrack. Philips is sceptical if this will really be common not due to technical reasons but for creation reasons. That is musicians will find it to be more difficult to create multi-channel music than stereo music so it will take time before this happens. Until then Philips considers they will thanks to QMSS offer a superior sound experience when it comes to soundtracks in games.

In the few that they think will use DD 5.1 tracks they said it really should work on their card since PowerDVD installs the AC3 decoding software. That is if the games follow MS standard they should automatically detect and use PowerDVD’s installed AC3 decoding software. Scott McNeese admitted it’s a risk this will turn out to not work but if so they will do their best to solve it. Also worth noting only the Acoustic Edge bundles PowerDVD so for the rest of the Edge series you either need to buy PowerDVD or you have to do with QMSS. Currently no game that I’m aware of in the PC market includes a DD 5.1 soundtrack with the exception of the DVD editions of some games using it as part of a movie clip.

During the formal presentation Philips brought up another knock on the DD 5.1 tracks in that they are going against another trend of offering more interactive soundtracks using DirectMusic. I think Valve Software already years ago showed how you can offer an interactive experience using CD audio. You could of course do the same with DD 5.1 but I do agree DirectMusic is a more elegant solution and can offer a more interactive soundtrack than what’s really practical using CD audio/DD 5.1 tracks, mostly due to limited storage.

When bringing up the nForce and its killer feature, Dolby Digital Encoding, Scott McNeese pretty much echoed Creative Labs stand point in that it’s not a very useful feature in the PC market where most users with a multi-channel system have the separate 4 or 5.1 inputs required to connect to the soundcard without having to first encode it to Dolby Digital. He also seemed less concerned about the nForce and its Dolby Digital Encoding than Creative, whom I got the impression are more worried users will believe Dolby Digital Encoding is an advantage to them even when it isn’t. That is they (the users) somehow think Dolby Digital Encoding enhance the sound quality when in fact it can only do the opposite. The reason nVidia offers it is only to be able to take advantage of the surround channels of the DD 5.1 systems that lack separate rear inputs. It may also make connectivity simpler for systems that have separate inputs. In the living room this probably covers the majority of the multi channel systems which why it’s a key feature of the XBox.

We never discussed in any detail the other competitors on the market beyond asking why Philips went with QSound for the 3D sound and reverb technology instead of Sensaura. Considering the focus on QMSS in the soundcard presentation it should come as no surprise this was one major reason to select QSound. He also finds QSound in general to offer a better experience even though he admits some aspect of Sensaura 3D sound engine are better. He also revealed that Philips may use other chips in the future than their own if it makes sense and then also mentioned they would now do just that in the very low-end retail market. The card in question is Philips Harmonic Edge which use ESS Technologies Allegro chip. Interestingly enough it’s using Sensaura. It’s most likely using Sensaura since all other ESS chips do, plus being just a 2-channel card QMSS would not have been useful. I doubt we will see any high-end soundcard from Philips using Sensaura anytime soon, what’s more likely though is that they may use some of their own in house developed algorithms instead or in complement to the technology they licensed from QSound.

When on the subject of the competition it’s interesting to compare the focus of Philips presentation with the one Creative held as part of their Audigy tour a couple months earlier. There are some similarities and some clear differences. The similarities are mostly they both consider playing games, music and DVD movies to be the major reason most people buy a new soundcard. They also both consider playing games and music to be the two more important with DVD movie watching mostly being a trend among college students and others in more cramped apartments. One clear difference is that Philips unlike Creative Labs doesn’t target the music creating crowd.

Another noticeable difference in the presentations is Philips greater focus on enhancing music playback through different algorithms (most importantly QMSS) while Creative mostly focused on the excellent sound quality the Audigy card offers. Now Creative still offers ways to change/improve the sound experience like applying reverb or enable CMSS (similar to forcing Dolby Prologic) but it was not something they brought up as major features of the Audigy card. Perhaps that was partly due to considering or rather wanting us to consider only the Live to be an Audigy competitor and not products from other companies.

Philips didn’t reveal anything about any specific future soundcards but talked in general about what future products may bring. Unlike some of the competition they didn’t spend even a word talking about major improvements in sound quality which they already consider to be excellent with the current line-up as well as most of the competition. Now that doesn’t mean future chips won’t offer improved basic sound quality, especially measurable ones, but that’s not where they see the major improvement occurring. It’s instead in the algorithms like improved 3D audio, reverb, stereo expansion and similar that you will notice the most drastic improvements. Some of this might be in future drivers for the current cards while others may require new hardware.

Other progress will be ease of use and improved compatibility by moving outside of the box. Scott revealed that moving the soundcard outside of the box had already been high on PC OEMs request list 3 years ago. He now thinks it’s not more than 2-3 years away, perhaps even less. This box may be a standalone unit connected to the PC through the USB or some other port or it may be integrated into the speaker systems. I would guess both will occur, with the separate box being more common in more high-end solutions, at least for starters.

Pure host based (that is using the CPU) solutions may also start to be more common but a clear problem is it will be much more difficult to get people to actually pay for host based solutions than hardware. People are simple more sceptical about software solutions offering good quality. According to Scott McNeese even USB 1.0 is really good enough for multi-channel audio. The past issues with audio drop outs and other issues can be fixed in software and are fixed out of the box in Windows XP according to Philips.

When it comes to integrated solutions on the motherboard Scott McNeese didn’t find them to be really worth it since end users are, as with software solutions, very sceptical about them. That is you cannot expect to charge much if any more for a motherboard with a nice integrated sound chip than one using the most basic AC97 solution.