3D Sound Surge has posted their early impressions of I/O Magic's Canyon3D2 based Hurricane Extreme sound card

ESS has been a major player in the PC audio chip market for several years but for the most part their success has been in the OEM market. In the retail market they early on had great success when PCI soundcards first hit the market, but by the fall of 1998 they didn’t have a chip that could really compete with Aureal’s Vortex2 and Creative Labs’ Emu10k1. This was all supposed to change with the launch of the original Canyon3D chip in 1999. It didn’t take long until the first advertised as high performing board arrived using this chip via the introduction of Terratec’s $200 DMX Sound System. Unfortunately lacking drivers prevented this board from ever becoming a good gaming card. The situation improved significantly when Diamond/S3 released the MX400 later that year. While the drivers were still far from perfect it definitely could have become a strong challenger to the Live and Vortex2 cards if Diamond/S3 put more effort in promotion and driver development. As you probably know the reason why this never happened is S3/Diamond (now SonicBlue) not long after decided to leave the soundcard and graphics market to focus on faster growing markets like MP3 players and cable/DLS modems.

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