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IMG recently spoke with Jason Ivan, the Director of Product Marketing for M-Audio's Consumer Division, about their new consumer audio products, the Revolution 7.1 and Sonica Theater. Jason covers a variety of topics, including the capabilities of the Revolution and Sonica Theater, the current state of Mac audio and why he feels M-Audio will succeed where others have failed. Here, he is asked which surround sound API he feels is most promising for the Mac platform:

IMG: Mac users have craved surround sound in games for a long time and Creative's SoundBlaster Live! gave them a taste of the experience. What does M-Audio think is the most promising surround sound API on the Mac and why?

Jason Ivan: We’re still looking into this one, so I don’t have a good answer for you yet. Sound is especially important in networked gaming since you gain a real a real advantage against the people you’re playing when you can hear where someone’s coming from. On the PC, the surround sound APIs exist to support this. On the Mac, I think this will take some more time to support at the audio card driver, OS, and game levels. We’d love to see this happen on the Mac. OpenAL looks interesting, but we’ll still need to investigate where the technology’s at before I can really comment on it.

Interview with M-Audio's Jason Ivan

Revolution 7.1

Sonica Theater

M-Audio

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