I think the Phillips Sound Card sucks. I purchased the Acoustic Edge based upon a review I read in Maximum PC magazine. The system I was installing the card uses the Abit VP6 motherboard with dual Pentium III 733 CPUs. When I installed the card, everything seemed to work fine. When I tried playing some MP3 files, the file would start to play the music then the system would hang, and the sound would go into a fast loop playing a few notes over and over and over again in rapid succession. The only way to stop program and to release the hang was to reboot the computer. After troubleshooting the O/S and finding nothing wrong and thinking that this was due to a bios issue, I updated the mobo bios. Still the same thing happened. To isolate the problem I removed all unnecessary peripheral cards. Still the same thing happened. I went to the Phillips website to d/l the latest drivers. At the time I tried to do this, Phillips had this moronic system where you couldn't d/l the drivers directly, but rather it tries to install them over the internet - which also caused the computer to crash. I ended up yanking the card out and replacing it with my SB Live! sound card. Then everything worked fine again. No problems, no hangs. Regardless of how well the Phillips acoustic sound card performs, I don't believe that the blame should be placed on non-intel chipset makers like VIA. The blame squarely rests on Phillips for not being able to produce a sound card that is universally accepted or for not printing a warning on it's box stating this incompatibility.

I read this recent review. Like all the others I have seen, it gives a
glowing recommendation. Based on similar recommendations, and the claimed
compatibility with Windows 2000, I bought this card last Spring for a new
dual PIII processor system running Windows 2000. I had frequent crashes
that took me a long time to pin down to this sound card. It turns out that
it is NOT dual processor compatible in spite of the fact that this is a
main feature of Windows 2000. I called Phillips about this and finally
got the answer from the head of their technical support division that
indeed they knew it was not dual processor compatible in spite of the fact
that the box and their web site made no mention of this limitation. I
asked when they would have updated drivers to fix this problem, and he
said never, as their engineers had no idea of how to implement this. He
said unfortunately that it was an upper management decision to not honor the
warranty and refund or replace the product because it was not "defective"
according to their standards. I don't know if they are now publicly
admitting this or not. They would not send me an email stating what they
told me over the phone. You might want to check this for yourself and then
warn people with dual processors against this product.

The Philips Acoustic Edge audio card DOES NOT SUPPORT SMP (multi-processors) The card is, by far, better then the SBlive in latency, quality and the ability to share an IRQ. Not to mention the noise level is MUCH lower then the SBlive in a real world situation where the only way the SBlive gets good s/n ratios is when everything but the source being recorded is muted, which is good advice but some of us hate having to configure everything again and again to perform different tasks. Hope this lets a little light in the situation. It's not the card, it's not the motherboard. It's thoes damn drivers! ATI doesn't have any ties to, or write the drivers for, Philips do they?
-Jeff
Lazzer408@yahoo.com