Verdict: Good surround sound effects at a bargain price

It may not have a huge presence in the PC market, but Philips does produce a wide range of PC-related audio products. In fact, its A3.610 Acoustic Fusion speaker set picked up an Approved award for its excellent sound quality at a killer price.

The Sonic Edge makes just as much of an impression for the same reason. It's at the lower end of the Philips range of sound cards, offering six-channel support and operating internally with 16-bit accuracy at a sampling rate of 48KHz. This places it a step behind all the other cards on test, which offer either more channels or greater internal precision. The backing plate features colour-coded connectors and a midi/gameport. The major gaming standards such as EAX 2, DirectSound3D and A3D 1.0 are supported using QSound 3D algorithms.

The main point of interest comes from its audio processing tricks, made available through the Sound Agent 2 software. This is a slick-looking interface to the various features on offer, the highlight being a number of QSounds effects.

Along with typical features, such as an equalizer, there are two panels called QSizzle and QRumble, though these fancy-sounding effects are essentially just bass and treble controls. There's also QXpander, which enhances the width of the stereo field. A nice touch is the graphical illustration that presents a clear visual picture of how the presets will affect the sound.

The most interesting effect is QSound Multi Speaker System (QMSS). Similar to Creative CMSS and Dolby Pro Logic II, this generates a discrete 5.1 sound field from a stereo recording. Testing with various MP3 tracks gave mixed results. While it produced a convincing mix with some tracks, with others it left undesirable audio artefacts. Overall, it's a worthwhile feature and can be put to great effect with music and stereo DivX movies.

With its rock-bottom price we weren't expecting much in the way of performance, but were amazed that the Sonic Edge was slightly faster than the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 LS while running the Call of Duty test in EAX 2, though in the Wolfenstein test it trailed by a similar margin.

Overall, the Audigy 2 delivers better output quality and offers EAX 4 effects. But with decent performance and a good software bundle for less than £20, the Sonic Edge offers excellent value.

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