Creative Technologies, best known for its SoundBlaster line of audio cards, announced that it had filed a lawsuit against companies Diamond Multimedia Systems and ESS. The action is a patent infringement lawsuit over an alleged violation of US Patent 5,698,803.

　　Papers were served on Diamond even before Wednesday's announcement of its new audio card, the Sonic Impact S70.

　　The patent relates to an underlying PCI audio technology - the ESS Maestro-2 chip for audio processing - incorporated into Diamond's Sonic Impact card. This explains why ESS is also named in the suit.

　　GameSpot News contacted Creative Labs' Rick Myllenbeck for more details. By way of background, he said the patent in question was originally filed by E-mu systems, a company Creative purchased in 1993. E-mu is well known in the audio world for making synthesizer hardware and other high-end audio equipment. Myllenbeck said that the suit was brought about "to protect Creative's interest in the technology."

　　The patent addresses a core part of the technology called multipoint interpolation. In layman's terms, it refers to the way the sound card is enabled to use host memory (in this case, the memory in your PC) to cache sounds and other audio files. Multipoint interpolation permits low-cost soundboards (that maintain high-quality sound) to be introduced to the marketplace.

　　Considering all the recent announcements about hardware manufacturers releasing PCI sound cards, GameSpot News asked when Creative would play its hand and introduce a PCI-based card? Myllenbeck would only say that one would be coming soon.

　　When GameSpot News contacted Diamond Multimedia for a comment, a spokesperson said that it would be issuing a public statement tomorrow.