No, I really don't think the Vortex 1 can do it. Just need to be patient and some should pop up at decent prices.

I got a box of five SQ2500's a while back. I'd consider sending some out for free, but the shipping monopoly in this country doesn't make it worth it for anyone.

Is there an example of a A3D 2.0 test that would verify one way or the other?

No, the AU8820 have no hardware support for A3D 2/3.0. The A2D 3.12 include have been completely misunderstood this entire time by the community as an A3D 2/3.0 emulation API.
As per the tech manual A2D is only the non-MMX optimized version of the A3D API, and those 3.12 support files only work properly with AU8830 cards.
A3D 3.0 was partially designed to give all DS3D cards A3D features like doppler and occlusions and A3DVerb, but not HRTF or WaveTracing which is what makes the Vortex2's so nice sounding.
WaveTracing was done 100% on the CPU and calculated the impulse response coefficients that could be used in the AU8830 hardware, since Aureal coded it to work closely with the AU8830 hardware, it's not easy to hack to work with others.

Any A3D 2.0 demo from the installers can be used to test on an AU8820 card, they should run but you wont have hardware HRTF or Reflections working. Doppler and Occlusions should work fine.

firage wrote:

No, I really don't think the Vortex 1 can do it. Just need to be patient and some should pop up at decent prices.

I got a box of five SQ2500's a while back. I'd consider sending some out for free, but the shipping monopoly in this country doesn't make it worth it for anyone.

Shipping costs have risen here too in the last week. They raised the prices aprox 50% to 60%.
And the mailman only delivers 1 or 2 times a week now, instead of 6 times a week.

One 1000 gram letter from Denmark to Finland now costs 100 Danish Kroners. (15 US Dollars)
If it need to be delivered by a mailman to an adress in Finland, the price are 200 Danish Kroners.
What are the prices in Finland?

brostenen wrote:

One 1000 gram letter from Denmark to Finland now costs 100 Danish Kroners. (15 US Dollars)
If it need to be delivered by a mailman to an adress in Finland, the price are 200 Danish Kroners.
What are the prices in Finland?

Looked up the current pricing for a couple practical items:
Registered small packets under 250g: 17,80€ Europe/26,50€ outside of Europe, between 500g-1000g: 21,80€ Europe/46,30€ outside of Europe
Economy small packets under 250g: 6,70€/10,30€, between 500g-1000g: 17,00€/24,70€
Domestic parcels (anything thicker than 30mm) start at 2kg, 8,10€.

Could be worse, I guess.

eBay basically requires registered shipping, which is not really a practical option for a lot of stuff.

Thanks for clearing that up for me

firage wrote:

Looked up the current pricing for a couple practical items: Registered small packets under 250g: 17,80€ Europe/26,50€ outside of […]
Show full quote

brostenen wrote:

One 1000 gram letter from Denmark to Finland now costs 100 Danish Kroners. (15 US Dollars)
If it need to be delivered by a mailman to an adress in Finland, the price are 200 Danish Kroners.
What are the prices in Finland?

Looked up the current pricing for a couple practical items:
Registered small packets under 250g: 17,80€ Europe/26,50€ outside of Europe, between 500g-1000g: 21,80€ Europe/46,30€ outside of Europe
Economy small packets under 250g: 6,70€/10,30€, between 500g-1000g: 17,00€/24,70€
Domestic parcels (anything thicker than 30mm) start at 2kg, 8,10€.

Could be worse, I guess.

eBay basically requires registered shipping, which is not really a practical option for a lot of stuff.

I wish there would be more of those in europe.
The shipping costs are a real pain 🙁