In general, the add-in sound card market has been dominated by Creative Labs and its SoundBlaster series of cards over the last few years. Aureal was purchased by Creative several years ago. Turtle Beach barely has any presence in the add-in market. Another issue is integrated audio has taken giant leaps forward. Almost every Intel based motherboard today comes with Intel's High Definition Audio standard.

The audio provided by HDA is sufficient for almost every user on the market today. On the AMD side of things, integrated audio has not moved past the AC'97 standard. Blue Gears is a relatively new company in the United States. Founded this year, the company sells sound cards and is the exclusive distributor of Hitec sound cards in the United States. Hitec is one of the largest audio computer equipment companies in Korea. Their specialty is in Dolby Digital sound cards using C-Media chipsets. C-Media is a audio chip manufacturer that has been in the business for many years.