As the power of the PC continues to grow, so does the quest for technology. In the past many companies have focused only on graphics technology and have not put an enormous effort into digital sound effects. As the number of sound cards flooding the market increases daily, digital audio has become an integral part of any serious PC entertainment application.

Developers and consumers alike are no longer satisfied by simple "one shot" digital sound effects. In the real world we hear many sound simultaneously; thus the need for real time mixing of sound samples has become mandatory as today's entertainment applications strive for realism.

Once of the first applications to feature real time digital mixing was "Front Page Sports Football" by Dynamix, Inc. In this product, digital mixing enables one to hear the roar of the crowd, the call of the referee, and the other sounds of a football game simultaneously, providing a very realistic experience. To date, there are only a handful of entertainment titles that feature digital mixing. For the most part, this is because digital sound is still very new to many developers and very few sound cards provide real time mixing capabilities.

Creative Labs' Sound Blaster AWE32 provides real time mixing capability by allowing digital samples to be uploaded to the sound card and then played simultaneously by its power DSP based architecture. The Sound Blaster AWE32 is among the first sound cards to support this capability that undoubtedly will be a required feature on future sound devices as simultaneous digital sound playback and MIDI triggered digital sound effects are becoming the wave of the future.

In addition there are several commercial packages on the market that provide real time mixing capabilities for sound cards, such as the Sound Blaster series that do not provide on board mixing. The Sound Operating System (S.O.S.) by Human Machine Interfaces, Inc (503-687-6509) was the first commercial package to feature this technology. John Miles, of Miles Design (512-346 9595), has announced that digital mixing will be available in the next release of AIL. Either of these packages, combined with the awesome capabilities of the AWE32 is the ultimate solution for all game developers looking, or rather listening, for virtual audio realism.

As the field of multimedia continues to expand, we will come to see that we have only scratched the surface of what is possible in the sound arena. Now the 486-based computers are becoming the target of many entertainment developers, we should begin to see a whole new generation of sound technology emerge on the PC platform.

Watch for the new wave of high powered entertainment titles that will appear for the 1994 Christmas season. They should reveal some of the best sounds and music heard on the PC platform to date.