In the past three years, Creative Labs has pretty swept floor with their Sound Blaster Live! line of sound cards. The biggest competition was from Aureal's Vortex2 which offered equivalent (if not better) quality, yet it lacked the powerful functionality of EMU10k1 DSP (Digital Signal Processor) that powered the SB Live cards.  Due to the programmable nature of EMU10k1, with additional updates (LiveWare) Creative was actually able to increase the capabilities of their sound cards and offer more to their users than what they had already bought.  Later on, after having learned a couple of lessons from the Borg (Nvidia was trained by them too), Creative decided to acquire Aureal's core assets and get rid of competition the old fashion way, which soon made them the best bang for the buck audio solution for any kind of system. However competition is arising once again, and in the past few months we have come to see some quality sound cards that definitely make you think twice before blindly buying that SB Live card. Two examples would be Philip's Acoustic Edge 5.1 and Santa Cruz/SonicFury.

Today's we are taking a good look at VideoLogic's latest, SonicFury with 5.1 channel output. In terms of hardware, the SonicFury is identical to Turtle Beach's Santa Cruz, the only other difference being the bundled software. The fact of the matter is that Turtle Beach and VideoLogic have partnered up and each one is distributing their sound card in different countries around the world. Both companies have an excellent reputation in the industry; VideoLogic previous sound card, SonicVortex2, was perhaps one of the best A3D supporting sound cards, and Turtle Beach has a good history of producing high quality sound cards. So naturally nothing less than stellar performance is expected, and SonicFury does a good job of living up to it's name.