Ok, I'll admit it. I'm a 3D sound curmudgeon. I'm disgusted at all the hype it's generated over the past couple years, and for good reason up until now.

Marketing and the gaming media have a fine tradition of latching on to one technological white elephant after another. After the whole sick episode of fascination with FMV video clips (remember when Falcon 4 was supposed to have a prerendered base you "walk" around as a game interface?) and force feedback (which years later, still does little more than shake your joystick) now they've gone and latched onto 3D sound like it was The Next Big Wonderful (but useless) Thing. If I had a dollar for every product that claimed that it could create "sound coming from all around you with just two speakers" I could probably buy a new hard drive.

Now it's not that I've never tried such products myself. My old Soundblaster AWE32 featured a checkbox to activate "3D Sound". It sure did something, but the effect was more like hiding my speakers under a blanket than anything resembling 3D. The same thing happened with the AWE64. I have a little black box called a "Spatializer" that claims it can create 3D sound when you hook it up to the speakers. Heck, even my VCR has a 3D sound feature. None of these things work as advertised at their best.

It should then come as no surprise that I view the extravagant claims of the new generation of 3D cards with some suspicion. At COMDEX I was treated to a demonstration of the Turtle Beach Montego II (based on the Aureal Vortex chip) with a full four-speaker setup, and it was quite impressive in the few demos I saw. Still, demos are just that - there's still a big question as to how it will behave in real applications and not-so-carefully-controlled conditions.

When the review board finally arrived, it turned out to be the two-speaker variety instead of the fancier four-speaker version. Oh well, so much for the cause of 3D sound. It might be interesting to see how a PCI sound card behaves, but I really wasn't expecting much.

Installation went relatively well. There were a few minor hassles with trying to make sure that Windows was well and truly using the right resources at first. (For example, European Air War only played a few of the sound channels most of the time) but after a little fiddling around with settings everything worked pretty well.

Some of my pet peeves with my previous sound cards were about noise. While Creative Labs claimed that they put in considerable noise-suppression into the AWE32 and 64, in practice, they would pick up just about every kind of noise imaginable. The cordless phone, USB mouse, sometimes even my SCSI and 3dfx cards all created audible and distracting interference.

Not so with the Montego II- the signal is thankfully quiet and clean. The reps from Turtle Beach explained that audio circuitry was carefully "insulated" to give it superior noise rejection. It may not be the first time I've heard such a claim, but it holds true in this case.

Ok, time to talk brass tacks. How does the Montego II's 3D sound actually work? In practice, far better than one would rightfully expect. With only a two-speaker board, I really didn't expect anything more than the classic stereo panning that we already get from many games. How wrong that turned out to be!

In practice, I could often sense the exact direction that a sound was coming from from anywhere in front. The effect was far more sophisticated than stereo panning, but it was totally intuitive. In fact, the positional sound was so good that one could recreate the scene in Star Wars where the hapless Jedi wannabe must fight a drone while totally blind.

The real testing came in Unreal and Battlezone. Unfortunately, simulations haven't adopted the A3D standard as yet, so it was necessary to look for a handy alternative. Shooters have jumped all over the A3D standard. Given the popularity of the genre and the obvious usefulness of 3D sound in such games, that's hardly surprising.

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At first, getting Unreal to work with A3D was rather difficult. The A3D splash screen and soundmark kept on popping up whenever I ran the game or jumped out to the desktop for a moment. In fact, for some strange reason, it created some kind of side effect that caused problems with the resolution settings in Unreal's 3D acceleration modes when used in conjunction with the TNT.

Still, both the A3D driver and the Unreal 220 patch were beta versions, so this is not too surprising. The results were awesome. Unreal sometimes plays a lot of sounds simultaneously, which can make things less intelligible. However, with the A3D sound, it was much easier to isolate a single important sound out of the background and focus on it instead.

Furthermore (and this is the real kicker) the positional sound was accurate enough that it saved me from making fatal mistakes. On several occasions as I was playing the game, I misremembered where a particular Skaarj was hiding. However, when I heard the familiar growl coming from behind a different object, I suddenly remembered, turned and started firing while backpedaling. Without that directional cue, the Skaarj would have had a perfect sneak attack from behind. It's not just useful, it also helps create a sense of physical immersion. When a fly buzzes all around you or a rocket shoots by, it really helps complete the illusion.

Imagine how useful this would be in a game like Rainbow Six. If you heard gunfire, you'd have a very good idea where it was coming from. Footstep sounds and creaking floors could replace the "heartbeat monitor" altogether.

Battlezone also benefits from the positional sound. The usefulness isn't as obvious at first, but since you have a fairly narrow field of vision in the game, getting those ears working as sensors really helps, particularly in a chaotic battle or when you're trying to minimize bumping into friendly units.

There are a few glitches at the moment. Some sounds that were fine before using A3D would glitch on and off. Other sounds that were normally audible were interpreted by the drivers as being too far away to hear when they really weren't, and sometimes the direction cueing wouldn't work quite right. These are really driver issues rather than hardware issues, so hopefully the company will provide the driver support to correct this by the time the board is released.

Of course, the Montego II offers more than positional sound. It allows for up to 320 simultaneous voices - 96 of which can be direct3d accelerated - although this doesn't do a lot of good (yet) as game developers are not in the habit for programming for more than 16 voices. There also is a wavetable synthesizer, but surprisingly enough, the MIDI instruments included are very poor compared to the AWE series. That's really surprising since the AWE itself is generally not well-regarded in this respect. Another annoyance is that the drivers are really large (around 20MB or so) and can only be installed on the C: drive in the current version. It can be a hassle when space on that partition may be running low.

Nevertheless, Turtle Beach and Aureal have really made a convert out of this curmudgeon. While directional sound and hundreds of voices may not be too useful for contemporary jet combat sims, it would certainly be exciting for the prop-era and ground combat genres. All the company needs to do now is work on the drivers, tweak the directional sound a bit, and offer a better set of downloadable instruments and they'll have a package that any gamer would be hard-pressed to refuse once having experienced it.