Diamond Lines Up its Big Guns

Diamond Multimedia's upcoming Monster Sound MX300 audio board has been hotly debated by gamers since its announcement. Powered by Aureal's latest Vortex 2 processor, gamers have been waiting to see how A3D 2.0 will improve on the already popular A3D 1.0 audio API.

Last evening, Diamond gathered game journalists at Diamond CEO Bill Schroeder's house (mansion) to take a look at several of the company's offerings including the Monster Sound MX300, the Rio MP3 playback device, the new Fusion Banshee-powered graphics board, and its wireless infrared networking product, Home Free.

Gamers have been arguing about the sound quality of the MX300 for a while, and it's been difficult to talk about since Diamond has been fairly quiet about the card. Last evening, a demo run by Aureal's VP of marketing, Toni Schneider, showed off some of the card's MP3 playback features and the card's abilities. For games, the MX300 showed off some of its abilities when playing Unreal and Half-Life. Schneider said that while Unreal only currently supports A3D 1.0, it will support A3D 2.0 soon. Not only will this mean good things for Unreal owners, but any other game that runs the Unreal engine will benefit from the support as well. Half-Life as always is an amazing title, and with the sound effects cranked up, it plays even better. Adjusting sound effects in the game was simple in the console screen as long as you're well versed in what type of audio effects you're looking for. One word of note: After seeing the games played on a wide plasma screen television with all the stereo effects around you, you'll wish you had a few thousand dollars to spare.

On the tech side, the card is capable of running up to 320 simultaneous voices and up to 96 streams of 3D audio data. What will it mean for gamers? When you're playing a shooter, you'll be able to hear every shot, drop, grenade, or explosion around you. The company is also going to announce an add-in card that adds SP/DIF input and output to the card, so if you're hoping to add a surround sound system to your A/V setup, you may be tempted to push your PC into the mix.

The card looks relatively simple to set up and will actually detect when you add a second set of rear speakers to give you four-speaker gameplay. Controlling the features of the card are similar to the last Monster Sound card along with a ten-band equalizer that should help gamers with less than stellar speakers adjust for better sound quality.

To end the demo, Aureal showed off the MX300's ability to decode AC-3 Dolby Digital with the DVD version of The Fifth Element. From all accounts, the card sounded as good as many of the expensive add-in Dolby Digital components many are adding to their stereo systems. Aureal claims that the card can decode Dolby signals down to two speakers or a set of headphones. While the purpose of bringing Dolby down to smaller form factors seems strange, Aureal says that Dolby Labs has been very interested in the Vortex 2 chip and its capabilities. Dolby Digital really isn't a big market for games since its only purpose would be for high-end cutscenes, but with DVD-ROM drives being packed into newer PCs, watching movies on the PC may become a little more common.

Diamond's most controversial product right now is undoubtedly the Rio. With the fire on the Web brewing over its ability to play back MP3 files, the RIAA has moved to sue Diamond in an effort to hold back the product's release. A court hearing is set for Friday afternoon to see if the product ever sees the ears of consumers. Diamond reps over the course of the evening seemed unfazed by the legal actions. Aside from the legal underpinnings, there were several Rio units on hand to play with. We played with an early model a few weeks ago, and the casing has been refined a bit with a textured plastic that makes it easy to grasp. While the sound quality is superb, the headphones that were attached to the units felt a little cheap and stiff. When the Rio comes to market, we expect that consumers will buy a nicer set of headphones to accompany the unit. There wasn't much time to listen to the units since there were many folks to talk to, and Diamond reps kept close eyes on the units when they were floating around - they know that most of the world wants these things.

We played Motocross Madness on the new Fusion card for a little while, and the performance seemed about what one would suspect from a high-end product with a 3Dfx chip. Its tough to gauge overall performance outside the lab, and once GameSpot's hardware guru Loyd Case gets a board for testing, we're sure he'll give gamers the scoop.

One product that we haven't heard much about is Home Free. Basically, the card allows you to connect up to 16 users to a wireless network in the 2.4GHz range with 1MB per second output. GameSpot TV senior producer Miguel Gonzaga and I got to play a game of SiN against one another to test the card's ability to keep up with games, and the card felt rock solid from playing (I won of course). If you have more than one PC in your home and would like to get some network games going with a friend, the Home Free looks like a really simple solution. Nothing is proprietary about that card since it uses all the standard Microsoft networking protocols; this also makes it compatible with just about every network game on the planet.

So there's the latest on what's coming for gamers from Diamond. We walked away with an MX300 and a Fusion board without drivers.... Until then they'll just have to gain some dust.