In early June this year VIA Technologies entered the quality sound solutions market. As you might know, VIA acquired ICEnsemble company, who developed sound controllers, in 2000 and besides the actual products that were already developed, recieved engineering team as well as a bunch of technologies. As a result, now VIA can offer not only high-end and professional audio solutions, but also develop and sell derivatives of ICEnsemble Envy audio chips on the other markets.

Earlier this year VIA Technologies’ audio division started to offer the Envy24 audio controller that could boast with 24-bit resolution with 96KHz sampling rates, and a 20 channel 36-bit wide digital mixer. This week the company announced the release of the VIA Envy24PT, a little bit simplified version of the professional audio chip unveiled before with 8-channel support. The VIA Envy24PT can support the latest DVD-Video Dolby Digital EX and DTS ES soundtracks for enhanced flyover effects, as well as having 4 simultaneous inbound channels.

The Envy24PT is intended for cheap sound cards and integration in mainboards. AOpen and VPSD have already made the decision to utilise VIA’s new Envy24PT audio chip in their upcoming AX4B-533Tube series of mainboards and VIA P4PB ENVY series of mainboards respectively.

Everything would be great if either VIA or Aopen also utilised a quality audio codecs in their mainboards. As it always happens, both companies will use VIA’s own VT1616 (or any other cheap audio codec) with 2, 4, 6 or even 8 audio channels support, but with rather poor quality. Therefore, although the Envy24PT can offer high quality sound, you will not be able to hear it due to poor implementation. So, the only indisputable benefit the new sound processor can offer us at present is relatively low CPU utilisation in entertainment applications.

- Computex 2002: VIA to Start Sound Business