The second battle in hardware is moving beyond the realm of video cards. Now, the new battleground is over 3D audio. No matter how you cut it, developers from all sides are coming up with new marketing names for their versions of 3D audio. The battle is over a principal technology alternatively given names like positional audio, environmental audio, interactive 3D audio, or positional 3D audio.

　　Aside from their names, one factor that separates the new from the old generation of sound cards is that they are all running on the faster 32-bit PCI bus (compared with the older 8/16-bit ISA bus). This makes the new breed of cards faster than the older ISA cards. And the PCI cards use less CPU resources, so if you want more power to stay with your game and not have it wasted on processing audio, the solution is here.

　　Since listening to nuances among the various audio cards at a crowded trade show isn't exactly optimal, we probably won't be able to hear all the major differences in sound quality until we get hardware to test in-house. I'd suggest that the audio companies come up with a phone booth or bubble that would come down over a user's head at shows to help convince people of the distinct sound advantages. We'll see if this problem is solved by E3.

　　At CGDC, one of the granddads of sound, Creative Labs, was showing off its upcoming Environmental Audio SDK along with its SoundBlaster Live audio card (with its new four-speaker solution from Cambridge SoundWorks) and the SoundBlaster PCI64 card. Strangely missing from Creative's audio arsenal was the Creative Labs Ensoniq AudioPCI. Although the company hasn't officially released the card under its new name (previously known as the Ensoniq AudioPCI), one could speculate that some of the reasoning for not showing the AudioPCI card was because portions of the card are similar to its sibling SoundBlaster PCI64.

　　In the AWE 64 kiosk, CL showed of the latest build of Final Fantasy VII, and it looked slightly better than the current PlayStation version because of its cleaner-looking characters. In the Diamond booth, the company was showing off its new Monster Sound MX200 with a full version of Incoming running through a Monster 3D II board. On the graphics side, the company showed off the latest Monster 3D II board running Unreal. The board should already be shipping alongside the Sonic Impact S70 and the Monster Sound 3D M80 - both currently in release.

　　The Monster Sound MX200 runs on an Diamond-developed chip that runs Aureal's A3D sound API, has outputs for four speakers, gold-plated connectors, and offers 64-voice wave-table sound effects.

　　On the sound API front, the war is raging as well, although the main battle is taking place on the hardware front. The major players include Aureal's Interactive A3D Audio, Microsoft's DirectSound3D, and Creative Labs Environmental Sound. Although some of the differences appear to be minor, Microsoft's API appears to be the de facto standard and backward-compatible API.

　　Aureal just announced A3D 2.0 in the hopes of keeping strong support in the gaming industry. At the same time,Creative Labs has taken a different approach by codeveloping some functionality with Microsoft's DirectSound3D. This might thwart the efforts of other audio APIs, but one could argue that Aureal's maturity in the market my give it a slight advantage (although whenever Microsoft gets involved, the rules always change).

　　One interesting audio technology that Microsoft showed off at CGDC was DirectMusic. Demonstrating what it can do in Monolith's upcoming anime-inspired shooter, Riot, the technology stands out by changing the music to different MIDI scores as the player completes certain tasks. A person from Monolith showed off a scene where he blasted all the enemies in a level, and as it happened, the music changed to a much slower-paced beat erroneously giving the player an audio cue that "all was well."

　　With an early technology like this, it may take a little while before mainstream gamers really take notice - but audiophiles and game-sound addicts should notice right away.