16. Philips PSC805 Aurilium: Cost Effective Top Of The Range?

Having tiptoed into the world of sound cards, Philips now has a USB card which we must say is appealing. In a little brushed metal box you can stand or lay on its foot, the Aurilium has a good number of controls and pilot lights on the front which make it look very attractive. This is a 24 bit sound card with 5.1 outputs and a claim to a USB 2.0 link.

However, we should point out that Philips does not ask for much in the way of minimum system requirements to support the device, which are is a 350 MHz processor with 64 MB of RAM. No mention is made of USB port requirements. This makes you think it will do fine with a USB 1.1; more of this later. On the other hand, the OS has to be Windows2000 or XP, which seems to contradict the modesty of the rest of the requirements.

On the front is the volume control with a mode selection (main, input, fader, subwoofer) which makes it nice to use. There is a button to run sound processing to give a 3D effect. The front also has a mike input and earphone output. On the back are three jacks with the six 5.1 channels, with the usual color coding. The type of connection is automatically detected and the relevant speaker mode selected. There are also the line-in and two S/PDIF digital outputs: optical or coaxial as you require. It has no digital input, though, which is a great pity.