Philips Rhythmic Edge 4.1 PCS703

Posted: October 12th, 2001
Written by: Davey "Daveyiv" McWatters

DVD Movies

For testing the Rhythmic Edge’s performance playing DVD’s I used Gladiator as well as Gone in 60 Seconds. They were chosen because Gladiotor has some of the best quality sound from any movie I have ever seen. Gone in 60 Seconds was chosen because it has fairly nice sound effects and was laying beside my computer. I used PowerDVD 3.0 to play them because it is my favorite software dvd player and I already had it installed.

As I started playing Gladiator I had DVD Qsurround disabled and was already in shock. It sounded truly amazing from my Altec Lansing ACS48 speakers. I didn’t think it could get much better without surround sound. Boy was I wrong, I enabled DVD Qsurround and it just blew me away. They say it adds virtual 5.1 surround sound, it sure does. I had never heard sound quality like this out of my Sound Blaster Live! Value.

Gaming Quality

The game I will be using to test sound quality in games is Giants: Citizen Kabuto. I chose this game because Philips sent it to me along with the Rhythmic Edge. The game, however, does not come with the retail boxed Rhythmic Edge. It also is fun to play and has nice sound effects.

The sound in Giants is really well done, it especially shines when you have a soundcard capable of playing it the way it is designed to be played. The voices sound really cool as well as the ships and environment effects. I played the game with Qxpander turned on just because it added that extra umph to the sound. Overall, I was very pleased with the sound quality from the game.

Just for kicks I decided to open up Unreal Tournament to see how it sounded. One word can describe it, WOW. The environment in this game sounded outstanding. As the rockets are flying at you it truly feels like you are in the middle of the arena you are fighting in. Also, as your walking through water the sloshing of your feet sounds really great. I encountered zero problems in either of the games I played.

CPU Usage

To test the CPU usage of the Rhythmic Edge I will be using the Reverend Thunder demo for Unreal Tournament. It will run at 1024x768 at 32bit color. Here is a graph to see the framerate differences between different options.

As you can see, you probably will not notice a difference if your playing in Low Sound Quality or High Sound Quality with Hardware 3D enabled with the Rhythmic Edge. That shows that it does a good job and keeps most of the load off of your CPU. As long as there is a no noticeable difference in framerate I’m sure everyone will want to show off the Rhythmic Edge’s true performance by enabling Hardware 3D sound.

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