Est. 1998
Playing Out of Control Gaming

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Hardware Nintendo DS
/ Adam Richardson

Yamaha Announces XG-Quad Four-Channel Sound Card

Yamaha's XG-Quad Digital sound card delivers four-channel audio, 64 hardware XG voices, and EAX support, headed to OEMs first with retail to follow.

Yamaha has announced the XG-Quad Digital, a four-channel PC sound card built around the company’s YMF744 (DS-1S) chip. It carries 64 XG voices in hardware, with an optional software add-on that pushes the count to 256, supports the EAX environmental audio open standard, and offers S/PDIF digital I/O in both optical and coax flavors. Yamaha claims a signal-to-noise ratio better than 90 dB.

The catch: this one goes to OEMs and system integrators first, so you will see it inside mid-range prebuilt machines before you can grab one off a shelf. Yamaha says retail availability will be announced later. The pitch is quality XG sound at a price system builders can live with, covering legacy audio and the newer standards in one card. Four channels trickling down into ordinary mid-range PCs is good news for surround gaming, and one more sign that quad speakers are where PC audio is heading.