Review: Philips Acoustic Edge (Page 5/7)

Posted: August 15, 2001
Written by: Tuan "GTk2" Huynh

DVD Performance

For testing of DVD performance, I just played Cast Away because it supports DTS and happened to be the movie I had laying around. WinDVD 3.0 is used for it’s ability to decode DTS Audio. The Philips Acoustic Edge does not come with WinDVD but rather comes with a full retail CD of Power DVD.

If you plan on watching DVD’s with the Acoustic Edge you will most likely either use Digital S/PIDF output or Analog output. Testing today will be done using 6 channel analog output because the speakers used don’t have a built in Dolby Digital Decoder.

After watching through the Cast Away DVD, I was amazed by the sound quality. During the scene where the plane was crashing, the Acoustic Edge brought theater realism to the room. Not only could I feel the effects, but the sound coming from the speakers were clear and had no distortion whatsoever. In DVD performance the Acoustic Edge definitely sounds better then the SB Live 5.1 -- you have to hear it to believe it.

Gaming Performance

This time around for gaming performance I only used Unreal Tournament with QXpander on to utilize 5.1 gaming. Unreal Tournament was set to use Hardware 3D Sound (EAX). The game was patched with the latest 436 patch as well as Creative’s EAX patch and death match libraries.

After playing a few rounds of UT, the performance seemed pretty good. I could hear the typical rockets fly past me or into me for that with high imaging accuracy. I did however; encounter a few problems with the Acoustic Edge while gaming though. The front channels seemed to overpower the center channel making the center channel sound faint. This might be expected since UT was designed for Surround Sound and not 5.1. You might be able to fix this problem by increasing the center channel volume in the control panel. Other then that small problem gaming experience was quite enjoyable and trouble free.

Audio CPU Utilization

For audio CPU utilization we shall not be using Audio Winbench but rather use something that demonstrates real world performance. CPU Utilization will be tested using Unreal Tournament Reverend “Thunder” Demo. Unreal Tournament is heavily CPU dependant and any sign of CPU utilization will show with an FPS loss. Testing will be done at 800x600 32bit color using High, Low, 3D Sound and Surround Sound audio settings.

The Graph above shows that the Acoustic Edge doesn’t use much CPU power to render Hardware 3D Audio. With the Low setting using the lowest amount of CPU power, it also doesn’t sound that good. Going from the Low setting to Hardware 3D Sound (High) results in a 2% performance drop. 2% isn’t really a noticeable performance hit compared to using low quality sound and makes a big difference when gaming.

Enabling surround sound results in a 1% performance drop. Again the drop isn’t really noticeable, Surround Sound shouldn’t really be enabled unless you have the Acoustic Edge connected to an audio source capable of decoding Dolby Surround such as a Dolby Surround capable stereo receiver.

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