The Acoustic Edge comes out of the box with everything you will need to get it up and running. The retail box comes with the sound card, the driver CD, the line-out cable (which is actually a DIN plug with three stereo jacks on the other end, one for each speaker set), the S/PDIF cable, the CD Analog cable, manual, etc. The CD comes with drivers for all versions of Windows as well as some software titles, including:

• Siren XPress 2.0 for music playing/ripping/organizing
  
• AudioPix
  
• Acid Xpress
  
• Yamaha YXG50 soft-synth

It also comes with an additional CD that contains version 3.0 of PowerDVD from CyberLink. This is a nice plus because the software alone costs around $30. Plus, PowerDVD is a nice software-DVD player.

The installation itself was a breeze. Simply install the sound card as you would any other. The only real difference came when connecting the speakers. You plug the DIN plug into the sound card. Then, you plug your front speakers into the appropriate earphone jack, your rear speakers into another, and your center channel (if you have one) into the other. The other DIN plug has two RCA jacks on it for SPDIF in and out. At first, this design may seem annoying as you are simply adding additional wires to the mess behind your PC. However, it is actually nice because when you want to connect other speakers or make other changes, you don\’t have to mess with reaching behind your PC or moving the PC out from the desk or wall. You simply drag that one wire out and connect it to whatever you want. This setup also allows you to connect a lot of equipment to this sound card. If you want, you can connect 2 sets of stereo speakers and a set of headphones to the thing at the same time. You can connect even more if you count the S/PDIF connection.

The drivers installed very easily. The only problem I encountered was with the additional Yamaha software. It popped up a couple annoying messages, one being some type of memory allocation issue with a string being too large for the memory block. Just bad programming on Yamaha\’s part. The Phillips software installed easily, but the confusing pop-ups all seem to have come from the Yamaha software. I ended up uninstalling the Yamaha software. Honestly, though, it was only for MIDI, and how many of us really care much about MIDI output? Other than that, just go through all the pop-up windows and you are finally done installing the card.

The first thing you need to do when you\’re done is to configure your speaker setup. The Acoustic Edge supports many different speaker setups. By going into the Philips Control Panel (shown above), you can set the speaker setup. I connected the Klipsch Pro-Media 4.1 speakers to it, so I chose the 4-speaker setup. After this, you\’re pretty much ready to fly, although you can fine tune some other things as well. For example, you can configure the S/PDIF and MIDI settings. In the effects area, you can choose to enable certain environmental effects to the output. Some of the effects are quite goofy, but you can change the degree of application to the output via some sliders. Honestly, I\’ve never found a point to these environmental effects, but it kind of cool nonetheless.

The other output modes are:

• Headphones
  
• 2-speaker – The QXpander option for 2-speaker mode applies a sound algorithm to the output to give the sound a more spatial quality than is normally heard from two speakers. It is no substitute for 4 or more actual speakers, but it does sound pretty nice.
  
• 4-speaker and higher – The \”Expand All\” option takes 2-channel output from Soft-DVD players and expands it to the proper number of channels so that is uses all the speakers.