Aureal Semiconductor
American electronics manufacturer
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 (a line of audio ASICs.) The company was the reincarnation of the, at the time, bankrupt Media Vision Technology, who developed and manufactured multimedia peripherals such as the Pro Audio Spectrum 16. Aureal went bankrupt in 2000 following a legal battle with Creative Labs, who then acquired the company's assets.
History
In May 1996, Aureal Semiconductor was founded from what previously was Media Vision Technologies Inc. after being involved in a financial scandal that led to then-CEO Paul Jain stepping down. Media Vision incurred in approximately $104 million in aggregate losses in 1995 before the company was renamed.
Aureal sustained further losses of $17 million in 1996 and $18 million in 1997. After having acquired Crystal River Engineering in May 1996, Aureal worked with them to develop and market the A3D audio technology. The technology was incorporated into video games, surround sound systems and sound cards.
On March 5, 1998 Creative Labs sued Aureal for patent infringement.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Aureal Semiconductor” as american electronics manufacturer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4034580. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 1996, 1995 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aureal Semiconductor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.