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Testing the Audigy
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Audigy is Creative's latest Soundcard range, a long overdue upgrade to the aging Live! range and coming in a year where Creative have faced some of their stiffest competition since the Aureal Vortex 2 was released.
3D Spotlight's complete review of the Audigy Player covers pretty much everything you will want to know, from Drivers to API Support, Connectivity & Performance Conclusions." The review doesn't mention how the Audigy works under any open source operating systems, though.
Why would anybody want a product from Creative Labs? I have several, now aging. I will not by them again. Their driver support is abysmal. They also insist on trying to install tons of buggy, useless bloatware software that rarely gets used.
When I first upgraded my system to 2 procs and installed Win2K, I found my system constantly crashing during games (Quake 3). It seems Creative Labs Liveware 3 stuff was not SMP safe. In fact they knew about it, but have they done anything to resolve the issue? The cure in the case of SMP Win2K is to use the drivers that ship with the OS.
I also have a DXR3 DVD decoder. It works great under NT4... but did the lazy bastards every release Win2K drivers? NO! They pretended to, stringing people along for months with late beta drivers that were buggy. I don't know what their excuse is: the card is a repackaged Hollywood Plus card, and Sigma Designs had complete drivers a long time ago.
Creative Labs support of the Live! cards in Linux was initially dreadful. It took a while for them to go down that road at all. Will the Audigy be the same, or have they been more helpful this time?
The Creative Labs news groups used to be a good forum for support. Something that you need a lot of with Creative Labs products. The news server (news.creative.com) seems to have been buggered for months, even though it's still mentioned on their web site.
All Creative Labs offers are cheap components. Literally. IMHO, they're not worth effort.
The OpenSource drivers for the emu10k1 in CVS on the 'audigy' branch at http://opensource.creative.com/ allow the Audigy to work 'perfectly' under Linux. I've had no problems thanks to some great volunteers in the community with sound w/ my Audigy under Linux. Might I also add that when I enable sound under Linux in 3d games, I don't take a performance hit like I do in windows :)
Look through the mailing list archive for instructions on how to install the CVS version of the drivers for the Audigy.