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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.
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.
Hook up the Live to some real speakers. No. Not those. Virtually nothing you can buy that are advertised as "computer speakers" qualifies. I'm talking about an actual preamp/amp/receiver and some good home theater or music speakers.
The Live is very, very noisy. The connector for digital output conforms to no standard known on earth (yes, you can often connect it to other gear and it will work, but the voltage on the thing is totally out of whack). There's also absolutely no dejittering or noise protection on the digital output.
The DACs are low quality, which makes a big difference if you're not using the digital output (see above).
Most people putting together home theater PC's used the Live only because nothing else was available. That changed last year when M-Audio made the Audiophile 24/96 available. It has high quality 24 bit/96 KHz 2-channel output and a good digital output for 5.1. Apparantly the latest version has 4 input/output 24/96 channels now.
Best resource for information is the HTPC forum on AVS. I haven't been reading there recently, so I don't know what the real story is on the Audigy.
Personally, I found the review linked to be pretty useless. They didn't actually talk about sound quality at all, at least not beyond the absolute basics.
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.
Actually, it's more accurate to say "If you're looking for QUALITY sound from Creative Labs, you're clearly just an idiot, though". (Again, I will disclaim from stating anything regarding the Audigy, since I haven't bothered to do much research on it).
CL has never made a decent quality sound card. Even back when the original 8-bit Soundblaster came out it had horrid noise.
But there are consumer level audio cards that have decent to excellent quality. Turtle Beach has long made cards that were comparably priced but far better in quality. And while M-Audio isn't a big name by any means, $149 for a 4 channel 24/96 soundcard isn't absurdly priced either (unlike so many things in high end audio).
Even so, yes, most consumer sound cards have crap for audio quality. But look at video cards. Nvidia has quality issues, but ATI has long been known for very good results (and I'm not talking about very good on that rocking 15" monitor you bought for $100. I'm talking about use in an HTPC where you're outputing to a front projection monitor with screen sizes ranging from 60-120" diagonal).
And the silly thing here is that Creative could really increase sound quality without increasing cost much. It only takes a few more resistors and transformers in the right places. We're talking about $1-5 per card.
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.