Digital Trends

Philips Sonic Edge 5.1

June 18th, 2003 | by Bert Mathis

Testing

I wanted to test as much of the capabilities of this sound as possible so I gathered some equipment; 2.1 and 5.1 Logitech speaker systems, PowerDVD 4 w/5.1, various MP3's and various movies.

I went straight to Dolby Digital with the 5.1 Logitech speakers, PowerDVD and a few of my favorite movie titles. When the first movie started, I flipped back over to Sound Agent 2 and started playing with some of the settings. I first took note that the QSurround indicator was illuminated. Sound quality was superb; well after 20 minutes of tinkering with the EQ (I have to get it JUST right). The LFE setting was very useful in tweaking the subwoofer to the correct bass output, and it was interesting to play with QRumble and QSizzle. I am sure this is the way George Lucas wanted it to sound, and everything sounded like what you would expect from a mid range speaker system and a 5.1 source.

With the 5.1 speakers still hooked up, I had to try out QMSS. If you remember, QMSS takes a 2 channel input and synthetically produces the rest of the channels for a true surround environment. I grabbed a few Divx movies encoded only in stereo sound. The QMSS indicator illuminated and I was enveloped in a wonderful surround experience. QMSS did an excellent job reproducing the extra channels.

Next, I tested QXpander. QXpander creates a surround sound listening experience with only 2 speakers. I hooked up the 2.1 Logitech's, and played a couple of DVD's and some MP3's. I have to say that I was pretty impressed with this feature. I was simply expecting some kind of reverb to simulate surround sound, but I found myself inside a sweet spot that disguised the source of the sound coming from the two front speakers.

Last on the list was a quick run through Audio Winbench 99. This is a rather old product but still serves the purpose of testing CPU utilization. Numbers were average on most tests and a little high on others, jumping up to 5% utilization. It was clear that you wouldn't want to run this card with a slow processor and a demanding game. Philips next card up, the Seismic Edge, boasts a powerful APU that frees up CPU utilization for gaming.

Conclusion

With this product being ranked 3rd in a 4 product line up, I must say that Philips has created an excellent price/performance ratio. Their innovative ideas for surround sound and low cost speaker enhancement make this product an excellent choice for those looking for an inexpensive, intermediate sound solution. I am hoping that in the future Philips will create a sound card APU (audio processing unit) that will actually include Dolby Digital decoding and encoding, even though they do a pretty good job without it.