Not too long ago computer audio was just a second thought in most gamers' minds. Creative's Sound Blaster Pro was the only sound card; you just didn't use anything else. Around the time of Aureal's release of their Vortex 3D positional audio, the gamer has had many more choices, and the sound revolution began. 3D positional audio is a must. Enter the Guillemot Maxi Gamer FORTISSIMO.

For the past few months Creative's Sound Blaster Live! Series, and Aureal's Vortex 2 based cards have been in the spotlight as the prime 3D audio cards. Guillemot has been making sound cards for quite some time now, their newest the Maxi Sound FORTISSIMO. Based on the Yamaha YMF744 audio processor this sound card touts the ability to do both EAX and A3D 1.0, on top of Direct sound 3D, and Sensaura 3D positional audio. All this and a price of only $49.99, the FORTISSIMO is set to be a very competitive sound card.

Guillemot has made it a well-known fact that the FORTISSIMO is the first sound card on the market to accelerate DirectMusic through hardware. DirectMusic is, as you can probably guess, a part of Microsoft's Direct X API. To make a long story short, DirectMusic works with message-based musical data, which is converted into wave samples, either in hardware or in a software synthesizer, in this case, through hardware.

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