Manufacturers announce dual sound card, dual optical drive platform

In the age of dual graphics card, dual hard drives in RAID0, RAM in dual channel, dual CPUs (Or dual core, for that matter), dual power supplies, dual network adapters (Think NVIDIA DualNet), other manufacturers that contributes to the rest of the computer began taking on this trend and creating something beyond the singular form.

First up is supported by major optical drive manufacturers, including NEC, Pioneer, BenQ, Plextor, and Liteon. Chipset manufacturers such as Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA has shown support as well, for the technology of implementing multiple optical drive configurations. This technology known as Revolutionary Array for Increased Performance, or RAIP, is designed to accommodate a couple of optical drives that teams together to theoretically double read speed. You'll need RAIP media; which are basically two discs (Either CD, DVD, or HD-DVD -- Sony mentioned that it will not allow RAIP content on its Blu-Ray discs) with half the amount of information on each. Both discs would be read from simultaneously, but you'll need both discs in both drives for it to work. Microsoft and EA Games is planning to release RAIP discs later this year.

Secondly, Creative has announced a dual sound card technology known as Real Implementation of Advanced Audio; shortened as RIAA -- to create a multi-processing of audio. This next generation of audio processing technology will require a pair of RIAA compatible sound cards; where one card will process half the sound and the other one will process the other half. Settings can also be changed to having one card render one second of audio and quickly switch to the other to render the next second; effectively cutting the processing required for each sound card by approximately half. Creative hopes to create better SOS (Sound Outputs per Second), but users with preliminary drivers claims that there is a noticeable latency between the output switches, creating very odd sounding audio. Please note that Creative RIAA will only support DRM audio.