3D Sound Surge has posted a review on the Hercules Game Theater XP

Prior to Aureal’s demise the retail multimedia sound card market was pretty much a battle between products featuring Aureal’s Vortex 2 technology and Creative’s EMU10k1 based Sound Blaster Live product line. That’s not to say there were not other interesting products during that time, just that the Aureal and Creative products had garnered almost all the attention in the consumer market. In that time there has been some nice products come out from a number of companies using technology from Yamaha, Trident and Fortemedia. The fear was that without Aureal pushing Creative the sound card market would become too static. Thankfully that has turned out to be anything but the case. With the release of the Voyetra Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and VideoLogic SonicFury (especially after subsequent driver updates for those cards) and the Philips Acoustic Edge there was once again significant competition facing the Sound Blaster Live line for the performance multimedia market. However, there was surprisingly still nothing to compete against the extra connectivity offered by the various LiveDrive versions bundled with Creative’s Live Platinum models.

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