Until a few months ago, music and game enthusiasts only had two major options when choosing a soundcard, those being one of the cards in SBLive! Family, or an Aureal Vortex2 based card… that has changed lately though.

It’s of common knowledge that Aureal’s current position isn’t good at all, when they decided to launch their own retail soundcard based on their own Vortex2 chip, they lost most of their big OEM deals, that includes Diamond Multimedia that had the very popular MonsterSound MX300 card in the market.

Diamond had to look around for new possibilities for their new soundcard once they got separated from Aureal, that’s where ESS Technologies come into scene. ESS has this new sound chip called Canyon3D featuring Sensaura’s new technology, for sure it looked like a real winner on paper, combined with Diamond’s name and marketing experience, what we get is the MonsterSound MX400.

The Card

Although there have been certain changes internally at Diamond after the merge with S3 inc., we have always recognized their products because of its high quality manufacturing and the MX400 is no exception.

However, with Creative dominating the soundcard market, Diamond is bringing a new concept for the MonsterSound Family with the MX400, we were used to see introduction prices nearing the $200 mark but this time in order to catch up with the competition they are offering a full featured product for less than $90, now can the hardware actually live up to expectations? That’s the real point here.

Onto the basic stuff, the MX400 is based on ESS’ Canyon3D sound processor as we already mentioned, it does 3D Positional Audio thanks to Sensaura’s MultiDrive technology (details explained later), true Quad-speaker output, it carries EAX and A3D compatibility as well as Dolby Digital support (requires extra equipment), for sure, everything we are used to see on a high-end product nowadays.

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