Hoewel FiringSquad wat moeite heeft met de naam Philips (je schrijft het met één L 
), hebben ze de nieuwe geluidskaart van Philips goed bekeken. Net als andere high-end geluidskaarten ondersteund de Acoustic Edge verschillende API's, zoals DirectSound3D, EAX 1.0 en 2.0 en A3D 1.0. Deze kaart maakt echter ook gebruik van Qsound 3D-geluid, waarmee je het geluid naar een 5.1 systeempje kunt sturen. Hoewel de Acoustic Edge bij 3D-geluid een relatief hoge belasting voor de CPU is, heb je met een 5.1 opstelling wel subliem 3D-geluid. Hier FiringSquads conclusie:
With the Acoustic Edge's excellent 5.1 speaker management, it provides for effortless, high-quality DVD playback. Furthermore, the Acoustic Edge ships with the revered PowerDVD 3.0 decoding software. Not only is the Acoustic Edge one of the few sound cards to offer 3D gaming sound across 5.1 channels, but it also offers top-notch 3D sound while doing so.
Compared to other solutions on the market, the Acoustic Edge's 3D sound with headphone or two speakers leaves a lot to be desired. It is fairly obvious that the Acoustic Edge was designed with 4 or 5.1 speakers in mind. The fact that the Acoustic Edge fell behind its competition in all real-world gaming benchmarks does concern us a little. While this may be excusable seeing that pre-release drivers were used, Philips still needs to do some driver optimization.
The Philips Acoustic Edge excels as a multi-channel sound card. For a mere $99, users gain full-featured 5.1 speaker support and good 3D gaming to boot. However, the Acoustic Edge does not fare too well when you step out of the realm of 5.1 or four speaker setups, featuring only middle-of-the-road two speaker and headphone output performance. Nonetheless, as a 5.1 speaker sound card, the Acoustic Edge is a noteworthy card. If you're the proud owner of a 5.1 speaker system and you don't mind a little extra CPU utilization, the Acoustic Edge may be the card for you.
