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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.
I'm still waiting for real time, on the fly DDS 5.1 encoding. As far as I know, the only chipset that supports this is part of nForce, and there will be no standalone graphics cards built around nForce.
The problem seems to be one of latency. Even with fast hardware acceleration, encoding AC3 takes long enough to introduce perceivable lag. Unless this could be compensated for, this would be a bit troublesome for games.
Oh well. Both Live and Audigy cna do AC3 passthrough, so I guess I'm OK for games. One of these days I _will_ have a single wire from my computer to my receiver instead of four. Ah, perchance to dream.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I'd be surprised if the audigy ever worked on linux etc since they haven't even managed to get it working properly under windows XP (playback glitches, soundfont control acting oddly, surround sound apparently not working, all this on a brand new machine).. the europe.creative.com support forum is full of such stories.. come on creative, get the finger out.
I know with a group of geeks like this I'll end up getting moded as troll or something, but I don't understand why anyone would think that Live! is outdated. I can understand the need to constantly upgrade video cards, but in the way of sound most people do not go much beyond stereo sound, and those that do will usually end up with some 4-5 point 3D sound setup. For these purposes Live! is more than enough, so I would argue that it is not aging, outdated, or whatever else you want to call it.
I've had it for a few months now and I think it's great. Games sound great and the MP3 encoding is great. I finally bought an MP3 player and encode all my music through Playcenter. I've run it on Windows XP and now running it on WIndows 2000. I'm waiting for Linksys to release XP drivers for my wireless USB network adapter so I can go back to XP.
The emu10k1 cvs repository has a audigy branch that is working to some extent.
http://opensource.creative.com
The one thing I couldn't belive was how Creative faked the noise clean-up ability of the audigy. In the demo they presented in the software, they simply used to audio files and cross-faded them. Now from the tests that I did on it, the clean-up wasn't bad, but was nowhere near as good as the demo had presented it to be.
My Live! Value is good enough. The only difference between the AWE64 and AWE32 and the SB16 was channels and processing power. The SBLive! added EAX, soundfonts, and dolby digital stuff. Audigy. Just an SBLive! with more power. Doesn't sound different. Just supports a few more features that you really don't need. Heck, if you're not a crazy audio guy just get a PCI512. It's cheap. It works with everything. And it has EAX so you can get 3d sound in all the cool games. What else do you need?
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The review doesn't mention how the Audigy works under any open source operating systems, though.
The Alsa Soundcard Matrix shows all Audigy cards greyed out - which is "support is undetermined as yet".
That's saying that they don't have the specs and don't know if the card will be ever supported. My guess is yes, but not right now...
I have any audigy gamer. It still suffers from the same lag that the live had when under a MP system....
Scott Cassaday
The review doesn't mention how the Audigy works under any open source operating systems, though.
If you're interested in helping Creative develop open source drivers for the Audigy, go to their Open Source Page. Get the emu10k1 source and thumb through the mailing list archive to find out how to get the Audigy branch of the tree.
Don't do heavy wizardry? They also need lab rats for the drivers they're building, so sign up.
Past Creative cards (including my SB Live! Value) have caused data corruption when copying large files across the IDE bus as well as hissing and popping during mp3 playback. This problem affects at least the VIA 686B on my FIC AZ11E board. You can find out more information about the problem here.
Sadly, I don't believe Dolby 5.1 digital output still is supported by the EMU10K1 (SB Live) drivers. This despite the fact that the SB Live Dolby 5.1 capable cards have been out for quite some time. How can you expect to fully test a new sound card under an open source OS's when features that have been out about a year still aren't supported?
The review doesn't mention how the Audigy works under any open source operating systems, though.
That might have something to do with the fact that the Audigy is a hardware product for Windows. If someone adapts it to *BSD, Linux, etc., the quality of their device driver code should not affect the reviews that the product gets.
I don't know, for most common people, sound card technology doesn't matter much, it has pretty much reached the level it needs to. The only reason I upgraded from AWE64 to Live was because I needed a PCI audio card. The midi support under windows improved, and now I could do all kinds of neat surround sound stuff if I had the speakers, but, especially under linux, it doesn't do much that my AWE didn't, in fact, does less sometimes (no midi support). I don't mind, timidity is better anyway, and the sampling rate from 44.1kHz to 48kHz helps the playback of some files (software that doesn't downsample, not that I can tell the difference between 44.1 and 48kHz, 44.1kHz more than satisfies the requirement of the human ear. To appreciate 48kHz, you would have to be able to distinguish sounds approaching 24 kHz, while 44.1 had you covered up to 22.05, more than enough for common ears.. And the industry move from 16-bit samples to 24-bit samples for sound seem equally pointless... I don't think *anyone* can distinguish 65,535 levels of amplitude for sound, much less 16.7 million. Yet it takes up 150% the space (uncompressed). CD Quality s152ound: 16bitx441000sample/sec=705600
New standards:
24bitx480000samples/sec=1152000
This huge difference for imperceptible improvemnts? At this point it's not so much about improving quality, put pushing new tech to get consumers to buy more.
Anyway, the differences between Audigy and Live series seem less distinctive than between the AWE and Live series. This is not like the 3D scene, where completely realistic output is not yet possible. Sure you can add all kinds of mostly useless bells and whistles. You can mix tons of channels in hardware, but typically each application only makes use of a single channel, and done intelligently a small pool of 3 or 4 channels will suffice. Most sound applications that would take advantage of this do this in software anyway, and modern hardware can provide realtime preview in software without trouble anyway. The only thing Audigy has done is make Creative work less on the Live drivers, which are still a bit flaky on XP...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Despite my log in name, this is a serious post.
Warning: Audiophiles can just skip over this post. If you have a dolby 5.1 speaker system connected to your fanless, netbooting PC located in a soundproof room - you probably won't agree with this post. If you're like the average computer user with a reasonably-priced PAIR of amplifed speakers, keep reading...
Has human hearing improved to the point we require sound cards to keep advancing? It seems Creative Labs ran out of ideas after the Sound Blaster 16. 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo is CD quality - sure, a card with a better sampling rate can record, but honestly, when was the last time you recorded anything and needed better than CD quality? The noise generated by your PC's fans and hard drive would offset any improved quality in the sampling hardware. Of course, if you have a recording studio - you probably aren't using a PC for your sampling, and if you were - it's not using a Creative Labs product.
After the Sound Blaster 16, Creative Labs figured MIDI was the future and produced the AWE 32, several variations of it, and then the AWE 64. A few computer publications were even confused by the 32 and 64 note polyphony with bit depth and called them 32 and 64 bit soundcards, respectively; whereas in reality - they featured the same 16-bit DAC and ADC capabilities as the Sound Blaster 16.
The fact of the matter is, so-called "high-end" Creative Labs cards are the "Monster Cables" of the sound card industry. Sure, they look nice and cost a lot, but they're not noticably better than a standard PCI Sound Blaster 16. I've been using an old ISA Sound Blaster 16 since I bought it, and it still sounds just as good as the day I first installed it. I hear they're less than $10 on eBay now.
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Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
The best part about the Live! in my opinion was the introduction of the Live! Drive. For those of you who don't know what that is, check into it. It's a module that fills a full-size drive bay on the front of your PC, and has controls like Volume, alternate inputs, bass/treble, etc. It (in my opinion) has revolutionized the sound card market. I was happy to hear that the Audigy came out, hoping now the Live! prices would drop, but as of yet, I haven't seen any decrease.
As far as the difference, a salesman (yes, a salesman!) told me that it just "has more power". I have to say that Ghost Recon sounds just as lifelike as I thought it could get on the Live! system, but I don't think that it lacks anything due to 'not enough power'. I guess we'll see.
And they said zombies weren't real!
If Audigy is a Windows-only product, then some people will want to know that in a product-review. It is actually a bad point about the product in itself, that it isn't supported under Linux.
Now, if Creative does not want to support Linux-drivers, that is their choice, but I sure want to know about it, and thus the review should mention it.
There are three choices for Linux-support:
1. Ignore it
2. Develop own drivers
3. Release specs so other people can write drivers.
If Creative choose 2. they are of course responsible for the quality.
If Creative choose 1. They are responsible for possible lack of good quality drivers.
99% percent of gamers can't tell the difference between sound cards, except in a small handful of cases. Play generic motherboard sound system through good speakers and a Live! on a system without a subwoofer. Everyone will swear that the first one is a better sound card. Remember, the sample quality and sample rate are what really matter, and those are independent of the sound card.
In all honesty, speaking from both a developer and gamer perspective, sound card technology peaked in the mid 1990s, even prior to the Live!. It's a solved problem.
These guys at alienware do linux stuff and they're offering it on some systems (they do high priced systems but they're p1mp-455 n!c3). note that they also do windows systems, so just cos they've got the audigy and they'll put linux on your box doesn't mean that the audigy will work with linux.
I'm pretty annoyed that the breakout box only comes with the super-extra-deluxo-hyper-expensive version of the audigy. The really really really good thing about the audigy is that it'll probably help bring the Live's price down to stupid cheap prices.
I know that Live! had some problems w/ 2000 and XP -- have those been worked out? does the Audigy have the same probs?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
I was a little surprised not to see any mention in the posts already here about the Firewire capability. The Audigy MP3 and Platinmum eX models come with their own IEEE 1394 ports. (Actually, a whole bunch of them have ports, but it looks like they're crippled in several of the cheaper versions.)
http://downloads.viaarena.com/drivers/4in1/4in1436 (3)v(a).zip
i p
simple. Just U ask
Don't forget to remove space before (3)
Also the Latency Patch for PCI
" More VIA chipsets are supported
* "Standby" and "Hibernate" power management is supported on Windows 2000 and XP
* Installation is simpler
* More patches included: Aureal Vortex, Radeon LE
* CPU Idle bit is no longer patched, so CPUs run cooler
* VIA's MWQ patch is included (VIA's current patches have bugs)"
Here :
http://download.viahardware.com/vlatency_v019.z
Hoping this patch won't allow you to escape my rockets 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
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.
But not that many. Linux and the *BSD families have great penetration in the server marketplace (where high-end audio cards are not needed) but they are an insignificant force as primary desktop OSs. I don't care how many
It is actually a bad point about the product in itself, that it isn't supported under Linux.
No, it is not a "bad point" about the product. That's analogous to saying that a "bad point" about Victoria's Secret panties is that they don't come in plus sizes. Victoria's Secret chose their market. So did Creative.
So you think that a product review should explicitly state all of the operating systems under which the product does not run?
Ridiculous.
Just as a warning, I'm a game developer. Short version: if you're just looking to play music, no, you don't need a hardcore gamer's sound card.
But for those of you who are gamers, the Live! is out of date. The 3d sound support of the Live! is pretty poor, and although I haven't seen hard developer specs yet, it looks like they fixed a lot of it with the Audigy. I wish I could get some good hard specs on what EAX 3.0 is bringing us though.
First, the Live! doesn't support any sort of sound reflection. It doesn't accept geometry to let it calculate the echos and reflections, etc. The Aureal cards did this years ago, and finally Creative is catching up. Additionally, with the Live you get global EAX support, meaning you say "the world has a reverb of X and an echo of Y". The Audigy lets you do it per source, so you can have a reverb on one object, an echo on another, etc.
Essentially, the Live just does some cheap mixing of sounds using 3d distance to calculate volume. Then it passes the mixed sound through their DSP to add in effects. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I've found doing all the sound code for our game engine. From what I can tell, the Audigy does real 3d sound calculations using geometry that you give the card and has a more flexible dsp.
This definitely will make 3d games more immersive. Small hallways will get a closed in sound with reflections, ideally you could have echos if you were in a valley in an outdoor engine, etc. Of course how well this works remains to be seen, but the capability is there.
It is possible that you could tell the difference between 16bit 44.1ks/s vs 24bit 48ks/s. With 16bit sound the absolute best signal to noise ratio (SNR) you can get is about 96dB. With 24bit you can get a theoretical SNR of 144dB. The source SNR will dominate the SNR of the ouput, so assumeing good shielding the 24bit sound should be quite a bit better then 16bit.
Now there are some limitations. Most stereo gear is designed for CD sound (16bit) and won't do better then 96dB. The max theoretical SNR of an amplifier is about 130-140dB (can't remember exact value). I believe that is a limitation imposed by physics and probably has something to do with the charge of an electron. So while 24bit may seem like overkill it is probably a standard that will survive longer then any of us.
Regarding 44.1ks/s vs 48ks/s. Higher is always better. Nyquist's Theorem states something along the lines of: You can reproduce any signal if your sampleing rate is atleast twice as high as the highest frequency in the signal. So 44.1ks/s should be able to reproduce 22.1kHz, but it can't. Nyquist assumes an infinate sequence of samples which is clearly impossible. With more samples you can also do better digital signal processing. There are just more samples to work with.
To tie this altogether we have to consider one other reality: Electronic gear produces 3rd order harmonic noise. 3rd order harmonics suck. They sound bad, sometimes are even painfull. It results in a lot of higher frequency noise. So we have to compensate for this with better then required sample rates and sample bits. This is why the next CD standard will probably be 24bit and 96ks/s.
Does EAX really make a difference in games ??
My PC has a SB AWE64, so I've never personally heard any EAX effects... and I haven't really played any games since Quake2 and Baldurs Gate. I really curious to hear from anyone who's got the Live or Audigy about what kind of a difference and how noticable these EAX effects really are in today's games (not what may come in the future).
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Right,
Now, my annoyance w/ Creative is and has never had anything to do with the hardware, as only a somewhat interested sound-enthusiast, I'm mainly concerned with having a soundcard that does the IO i'm interested in. Creative's always done that without fail.
However, and it's a big however, also without fail, Creative's software has always, always, always sucked. And that wasn't just for emphasis. Under Win32, the drivers have always been at least useable, but the additional software, which is just as requisite as the drivers (for example, the creative remote center needed to use the LiveDrive!) has sucked . The installation problems noted in the review are ridiculous, and they're in my experience, par for the creative course.
For commoditized PC soundcard hardware, they're still the leaders, and probably rightly so, but if I had the chance, I'd love to sit around and zing the programming staff with rubber bands.
There are a few problems with the Audigy that prevent it from being a good card to record with.
Firstly, it still works for recording internally at 48k only, so if you are working at 44.1, every recording you make will be upsampled to 48k, then back to 44k. This causes pass band ripple and can be seen clearly on a spectrogram when the Audigy is fed with white noise. If you work at 48k, you will still need to sample rate convert before cutting a CD.
Secondly, the Audigy will not sync to an external digital clock, meaning that it cannot do sample accurate digital transfers. You will have to sync external gear to the dubious quality of the Audigy's clock, causing jitter.
The digital outs are only at 48k as well, so forget about clocking a DAT to the Audigy for digital transfers, even if it *could* pass a digital signal unchanged.
Thirdly, ASIO is only at 48k. This is because it has to avoid the internal SRC, working at 44k would cause an ASIO host to slowly lose samples, putting tracks out of time and causing MIDI to play late. Again, you would have to SRC before cutting a CD from your ASIO recordings.
Fourthly, the claimed 24/96 is playback only. You cannot record at 24bit or 96k with this card, and the DAs are fairly low quality, negating the point of 24/96 playback anyway.
I bought one of these with the belief that it would be able to do 24bit/96KHz A-D and D-A. The prominent 24/96 logo on the box, along with the obsfucated specs made it seem like it would do it.
The Fact is, it would only do 96KHz on the SP/DIF ports, and only do 24 bit at 48KHz (i.e. not 44.1 or any other rate). There was no way to record or play true 24/96 on the analog ports. What a piece of crap. Back to the store it went, then I bought a Digital Audio Labs CardD Deluxe, which does do true 24/96 and works great. It cost about twice as much, but at least it works.
bits does equal audio levels. I never made the claim that more bits means louder sounds, and I thought I made that clear. As you say, it allows more precision to be present for *all* volumes, i.e. more possible levels of amplitude can be discreetly represented. levels does not automatically equal loud sound.... (this amp is better because it goes up to 11, that's one better!)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Is the 3d sound supported? What's the quality of the driver? Does it work well on SMP systems? Live, AFAIK, was not only poorly supported but also caused hardware failures, especially with VIA chipsets. It seems that the only compelling reason for Live owners to upgrade is stability.(Much like windows, the next version is supposed to be more stable than the last...)
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I know with a group of geeks like this I'll end up getting moded as troll or something, but I don't understand why anyone would think that Live! is outdated.
I agree completely! I mean, if someone thinks their Live! isn't quite good enough, maybe they need to overclock it!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
If you don't notice a difference between the Audigy and a SB16 PCI, then you're probably using cheap $10 speakers that have the frequency range of a speakerphone. If you want good quality sound, you have to make sure all the components are good quality-- think of the "weakest component" rule here.
On my Klipsch speakers, the Audigy sounds better than my Live did.
There's an Awe64 PCI card sitting in one of my other boxes, and the S/N between that card and the Audigy is night and day. The Awe64 has a constant background HISSSSSSSSSS that you just can't get rid of.
Granted, I don't have a "typical" setup (external DAC and Mackie mixer), but with a reasonable setup the difference between various soundcards really becomes apparent. Hook up the SB16 to an A/V receiver, and good speakers, and you'll be appalled at the sound quality of the SB16, because the hisss and lack of high-frequency clarity will be readily apparent even over the whirring fans and hard drives in your computer.
The point is, the Audigy has the potential for much greater audio quality than creative's earlier soundcards, it just takes some effort on the consumer's part to minimize ambient noise and make sure all the other components are decent quality. Along the same lines, you can't run a GeForce3 Ti500 card through a 14" CTX monitor from 1991 and expect good image quality. You might even say the GeForce3 isn't any better than your S3 Trio64 card!
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
ISA is slooow. ISA slows down your system. IIRC, quake 1 does all of its own sound processing regardless of what synth you have.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Sony is working on/released a digital audio standard with a 2.8mhz sample rate and one bit per sample. The way it works, if the bit's zero it goes down, if it's one it goes up. You can encode any analog signal with it, with no restrictions on volume.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.