The Vortex audio accelerator chipset line from Aureal Semiconductor

Aureal Semiconductor

Aureal Semiconductor Inc. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid-late 1990s for their PC sound card technologies including A3D and the Vortex The company was the reincarnation of the, at the time, bankrupt Media Vision Technology...

 was designed to improve performance of their then-popular A3D

A3D

A3D was a technology developed by Aureal Semiconductor for use in their Vortex line of PC sound chips to deliver three-dimensional sound through headphones, two or even four speakers. The technology used head-related transfer functions , which the human ear interprets as spatial cues indicating...

 audio technology. The first member of the line, the Vortex AU8820, was announced on July 14, 1997http://web.archive.org/web/19971014130227/www.aureal.com/press/071497-vortex.html, and was used in by a number of sound card manufacturers, like Yamaha and Turtle Beach

Turtle Beach Systems

Turtle Beach Systems is a sound card and headphone manufacturer and direct competitor with Creative Labs-branded Sound Blaster. In 1995, the company merged with Voyetra, a company that made custom software for sound cards, to form Voyetra Turtle Beach Inc which is headquartered in Elmsford, New...

. After Aureal's release of A3D 2.0, the Vortex AU8830 (known as the Vortex 2) was announced on August 6, 1998http://web.archive.org/web/19990827184623/http://aureal.com/cgi-bin/pub/display.pl?template=press_aur_detail.htm&serial=100. The Vortex 2 chipset won numerous industry awards, and was used among other places in the Diamond

Diamond Multimedia

Diamond Multimedia is a company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players, however the company began with the production of the TrackStar, a PC add-on card which emulated Apple II computers...

Monster Sound MX300, which achieved near-cult status with audiophiles and gamers for the high quality of its positional audio.

Near the end of Aureal's existence, they released a Vortex Advantage budget sound card aimed at systems integrators, which ran on the Vortex AU8810 chipsethttp://web.archive.org/web/19990827184623/http://aureal.com/cgi-bin/pub/display.pl?template=press_aur_detail.htm&serial=1045.

All Vortex soundcards are still functional with latest Windows 2000/Windows XP drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 (32 bit editions only).