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Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Reviewed
Julio writes "For some, the Audigy 2 is what the original Audigy should have been, however without trying to underestimate Creative efforts, they are bringing us today a revamped soundcard that is set to raise the bar like the original Live! did, many years ago.
You will be happy to know that Creative has taken care of the board quality from the ground up, newer and better DACs are used to ensure 24-Bit/96-kHz/192kHz playback and among the rest of niceties the card offers you have DVD-Audio playback, full 6.1 surround sound, THX certification and the mandatory (for a Creative soundcard) EAX Advanced HD."
Please advertise my un-innovative and slow-selling product for free. Thank you.
A review of a six month old product!
Hip hip hooray!
Any buil-in DRM things or other nastiness that I need to know about? Meaning, can I use the full potential of this card in Linux?
El riesgo vive siempre!
All I can say is cool and hope that it will have Linux support, either from Creative of by Linux kernel developers. ;)
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Well, the Audigy 2 (that I pulled from a Dell at work) didn't work properly with SuSE 8.1 or Mandrake 9.1RC2 new installs so I yanked it in favor of my onboard AC'97 sound. Frankly, a sound card is a sound card. If I want high fidelity, the audigy 2 isn't the answer IMHO.
And how long has this card been out? What's next, a review of Windows 98.. .oh wait, that Microsoft, we actually pay attention to them.
Man, I remember putting a SB16 into my 486 dx2 just to play doom. Same reason I installed a NIC into it for the first time too. Head to head on a couple 486 boxen. No audigy for me, I got my $200 odd bucks saved for a 100GB drive.....
WTF AR EYOU l0s3RZ DOING POSTING OLD NEWS FROM like 1997 rfu 2002 wAnz its n00s back lololo!!!
With that out of the way, the Audigy 2 looks to be a real step in the right direction as computer audio finally verges on the level of hi-fi. I personally have a plain ol' Audigy OEM card that has performed quite well for me, considering I don't record. Thankfully, though, Creative has finally come through with a mainstream version for those who do.
Hats off to Creative for continuing to improve in a field that could so easily lay stagnant.
Nor did I get it.....
AWE 32 was the last big worthwhile 'innovation' in sound cards. I'm still using mine all these years later, and it's all I've ever needed. It's a real wonder sound cards are even around these days. Seems to me all the circuitry should be in the speakers, with audio delivered over USB. Reduce noise inherent inside the PC case, and you only have to pay once for some nice, expensive speakers (which you need, anyway). My days of paying $200 or more for a sound card ended somewhere back around 1993-1995. It's just not worth it to me to spend that kind of cash, when you still have to add the cost of speakers on top of it to see the performance boost.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Audigy 2 review the title shouts! I thought hurrah, a review of some sort of special edition on that will be completly out of budget but makes an interesting review. But alas, it is a review of a card that has been avaliable for months. Slow news day?
...it'll be about 4 years until they get the drivers right.
after the sb live fiasco a few years ago, i think anyone who uses creative is nuts. There are much better alternatives, such as the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, or Hercules Game Threater or Fortissmo III.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Ok, consider first that I'm not a hardcore audiophile, and neither are most.
Once I got positional audio by way of the Live! series, what motivation is left to upgrade?
I mean I get positional audio and EAX in my games, I get surround sound in my movies. I rip/encode/playback my MP3s. I dont lose CPU time to the audio system, or deal with the setup hell that existed back in the ISA cards era. My PC isnt a media jukebox or lined through a $10,000 stereo, just a 4 way speaker set.
Why would anyone upgrade past Live, if they weren't an audiophile demanding the very latest (and even then, why would they? Most true audio geeks I know run 10 year old equipment).
I mean what breakthrough technologies have been developed? Two more speaker channels?
It's not like video cards. When Doom 3 comes out, and doesnt run on my computer, I can guarantee it will be because of the old Radeon card, not my SB Live.
So, really, what's been added to these things? Are there any good arguments to upgrade?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I had read somewhere (perhaps thinksecret.com) that mac os x 10.2.4 would have audigy 2 drivers built in. Can anyone verify this?
today is spelling optional day.
I hope that their drivers are better this time around than with the first Audigy. Or at least, that their tech support has gotten better.
Can you believe it, when I asked them for a fix to a bug that prevented me from loading soundfont files with my brand new Audigy, the answer was that there "was no such bug"?
It took weeks before I accidentally stumbled upon a solution in a forum somewhere.
I bought the Audigy Ex (the first one) a few months ago. The Audigy 2 had just come out, but besides the fact that I got a great deal on mine, the external version had still not been released.
I didn't really care about the sound features that much, so I don't know it stacks up in that department, but what I was really interested in was being able to move all my cables from the back of my PC to my desktop. It drove me absolutely batty having to adjust the headphone volume by either reaching around to the back of the PC, or by running the mixer app. And it drove me crazy having to crawl under my desk to plug/unplug my headphones. Now I can plug in and adjust the volume with barely a reach.
I do wish that there was a master volume control on the panel, though, and I also wish that the damn cables attaching the external panel to the back of the PC wasn't so rigid - makes it really hard to position things. I understand that the Audigy 2 fixes at least the latter problem; I can't tell about the former because there doesn't seem to be specs on the Audigy2 Ex on the creative website.
The final wish on my list would be for them to have put a USB hub in the unit...oh well...
I regret every buying creative soundcards ... they leave you stranded in terms of drivers and support.
Slashdot shouldn't be giving creative free advertising on the front page
Works for me. I have this card in my box running Debian (sid) and it works fine with the CVS version of the http://sourceforge.net/projects/emu10k1 driver.
Granted I dont use midi digital out or any of the fancy stuff right now but the I get sound from the line out and the headphones (from the live drive) and the fire wire port on the live drive works as well.
Anyone hacking the bios of any of these multichannel sound cards to remove these kind of restrictions? .dll, as I found out on the video card/macrovision bullshit; properly written software ignores the video bs; now how about the audio?
Most of the functionality is in a
the Soundblaster series has always been just shy of being worthy of serious attention
from those who need their PCs to do more than play games.
The Audigy, while still not the Holy Grail (affordable, production-quality soundcard),
is head and shoulders above previous offerings.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Mackie, Alesis, M-audio, Roland, and MOTU (among others) also make professional audio interface equipment for recording and monitoring/listening.
There are a couple of Creative-licensed OEM products (Some of the Alesis stuff looks awfully familiar...) but most of these companies provide far better hardware and software for "real" sound applications. A nice audio interface w/ a pair of active studio monitors will sound worlds better than some cheap consumer surround sound system. The prices are pretty much comparable with Creative's "good" stuff.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Have they fixed their drivers so that they no longer have a file called ctfmon.exe? My SBLive! Value drivers have this and it clashes with something by the same name from Office XP. It causes me no end of grief. Creative Labs will never issue new drivers for my card to fix. Just one of a long line of complaints I have about their poor quality software, and shitty support like with the DXR3. Stick with whatever drivers comes with your OS, or use a product from another company.
There is talk on the web that the Audigy 2 has a hole in its bass response. Sorry I'm too lazy to hunt down a link.
Interested parties, especially home-theater people, should look at stuff based on the VIA EnvyHT chip which does 7.1 and typically has better SNR and lower THD than the Audigy 2, and in some benchmarks has shown to be less cpu intensive for gaming (i.e. higher frame rates with the EnvyHT cards) than the Audigy 2, although it ostensibly does not have as much hardware acceleration for 3D positional audio.
One such card, with *EXCELLENT* bass management is the M-Audio Revolution. See the card at one reseller.
I got the Audigy1 with all the bells and whistles, aiming to venture into the world of electronic music, sound capture, Dolby surround EAX gaming sounds etc.
All I ever did was the games.
It's really nice, but overkill - buy the budget version unless you intend to use the card to it's full potential.
If you have an Audigy already, there's little reason to upgrade.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
The problem with the original Audigy was its misleading claim of 24 bit recording and playback. It *seems* that the abillity is now there, but hard to get. Defaults sound like upsampling is still being used. Of course, I like the sound quality of talking out of my ass...
Every year or two, they release a new card, and claim it's the last card you'll ever need to buy because it's software upgradeable. Then, they try to charge for drivers for cards they market as upgradeable. Finally, the fact is, many of their drivers really suck and have huge flaws and compatibility issues.
Yet I notice that YOU did not get it either. Ergo, you are also a FAILURE.
/dev/null, do not collect root.
Go directly to
until it can do TRUE 24bit 96kHz operation(input/output) it will never be nothing more than gaming card.
dont know about this iteration of Audigy, but the Live Platinum, Audigy and Extigy would automaticlly resample whatever signal was thrown at it to 16/44.1, evenif the original signal was allready 16/44.1.
needless to say, this resulted in non Bit-perfect digital transfers(from DAT, CD, etc to HardDisc and vice-versa).
I'll stick with my M-Audio Audiophile 2496 for $130 thank you very much
the history of the world
I wonder how much the person gets paid who comes up with funky product names like "Audigy"? What exactly is it, Audio+Prodigy=Audigy??
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I still like my old SB Live! Value. Good clear sound. Does well with games and mp3's. Of course, I'm not exactly an audiophile either.
For most (90%) of people, a good set of speakers is a much wiser investment in sound quality than a good sound card. On a cheap set of speakers, an SB Audigy, SB Live!, the AC97 that came with your mobo, and even a 10 year old SB16 don't sound terribly different. Only good speakers can truly take advantage of a good sound card.
Tom's Hardware Review I own one and the problem I have with it is its ASIO access (for low latency with midi devices) isn't very fast, which makes it worthless as a synth.
If that was interesting 'news', then so is this!
sudo ergo sum
DVD-audio requires more bandwidth than can be handled by a digital coax / optical output. This is the same as on standalone DVD-audio players - they just have 6 analog outputs. Firewire is supposed to fix this...
Early in the review, it states that the digital out is always active except when playing DRM. This is at least imprecise if not just plain wrong.
I got an Audigy 2 very recently, and I love it. However, when I tried to pair it w/ the new Klipsch ProMedia Digital system (w/ built in Dolby Digital decoder), it didn't work well at all. There are two problems w/ this combo: On the Audigy 2 side, it only outputs stereo over the digital port unless there's a DD signal. So you can't even run the Audigy tests if you're only connected to the digital out, as you get no sound for rear left/right or center channels. In my opinion, the Audigy 2 should always send the exact same digital signal out as it's sending over its analog out jacks (leaving the DRM arguments to others).
On the Klipsch side, it only has front stereo analog input jacks - you can't do the required 3 stereo analog hookups. So for the vast majority of Audigy 2 out scenarios (unless all you do is play DVDs), you can't take advantage of the features of the Audigy 2.
Since Creative cards have apparently behaved this way for a while, I think Klipsch really screwed up here. I sent the Klipsch back and got the Logitech Z-680s, which also are THX certified, have a wireless remote, etc. This setup sounds terrific!!!
FWIW...
I bought one of these when they first came out - without a doubt there's no better card out there for the money. However, Creative's still got e VERY annoying software set that may or may not really piss you off... consider:
1. The software on the Creative website (soundblaster.com) are only updates. You CANNOT download full applications or drivers (that only work if you have the card, mind you). So if you lose your original install CD, you're hosed unless you poly up the $25 they want for a new CD
2. The software that gets installed (the mixer, EAX control panels, speaker calibrators, etc.) is a) a HUGE memory hog (we're taling > 92MB on XP Pro with all the bells & whistles loaded) and b) slow, because they chose not to use the standard Windows toolbox to build it. All kinds of unnecessary stuff is in there - transparent drop downs (like OS X), etc...
3. If you install the full software suite - it's ALWAYS there... at one point or another, every 10 minutes you'll be reminded of the fact that you have a CREATIVE card in your rig... and that stupid splash screen at every startup / login is one of the most annoying things... if you can find out how to shut it off the first time in less than 15 minutes of searching, I'll give you a cookie. Chocolate chip, even.
As always, this is My $0.02, so YMMV. Me? I get around this by installing the drivers only and the individual apps as necessary (which is rare since most of their offerings have better share/freeware counterparts).
I really do not understand the logic of Creative Labs. Why can't they offer up-to-date driver support for these other operating systems? Sure, they (Creative) are one of the featured Microsoft partners on *the Beast's* video ipod, but Nvidia makes the majority of the chips in the Xbox yet their relationship with MS doesn't hamper their ability to offer drivers for Linux, OS X, BSD, etc. Maybe they are just lazy. For all the talk about Linux adoption in Asia, Creative Labs sure is missing the boat, and they are a Singapore based company to boot! Maybe their CEO needs to be cained.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
*From the website*
:)
24-BIT/ 96 kHz RECORDING
The purest commercially available recording path captures the quality and subtle details of your audio creations
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 lets you make rich 24-bit recordings to your PC with an unprecedented 24-bit/96kHz recording capability, while ASIO support allows compatible music creation software to link directly to ASIO compliant hardware, allowing multi-channel recording simultaneously at 16-bit/48khz at ultra low latency of =2ms.
Can anyone verify that the latency is indeed =2ms? I'm not too involved with digital audio recording, but I have friends who do it. I remember them saying that the only real cards that have =2ms are the expensive ones like RMA etc. I highly doubt that a $99 card could do what a $1000 card does.
Good job on the firewire though
It's a great card, but I've had it for months already - and it wasn't just released when I bought it either.
A couple of linux notes:
* support was added in early January in the opensource driver
* the newest beta of Red Hat Linux supports the card out of the box.
I paid 200 bucks for an Audigy 2 Platinum. The Creative software that comes with it crashes my computer (XP Pro - P4 2.4, 512 DDR). Therefore rendering the remote control useless. The other software that comes with it not made by Creative is great, especially Cubasis VST 4.0 for home recording. SOF deuce is a fun game. When I make home recordings (acoustic guitar from a microphone) for some reason there will be an occasional pop sound. Otherwise the sound is just beautiful. It is great having the Front panel drive that came with the Platinum. I/O Ports Galore! and it is sweet having the volume knob for the headphones and mic input right on the computer. I think it sucks that if you want a black faceplate for the drive you have to buy it separately for 20 bucks. You should get the option to buy a black one for the same price as a beige panel one. All in all I give it a 6/10 because of the software problems I had and the occasional pop sound in recording.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
It seems this needs to be cleared up for the ignorant reactionaries in the audience...
The DVD-Audio protection does NOT cripple the Audigy 2 when compared to other sound cards because the Audigy 2 is the only card that supports DVD-Audio at all! DVD-Audio is not the same thing as audio channels on DVD playback which DO work through the Audigy 2's digital outputs.
The only time digital output is disabled is when DVD-Audio discs are played, but DVD-Audio is such a niche format right now that it isn't likely to seriously affect anyone.
All you need is an imbedded chip in the brain that encodes a wireless digital audio signal.
Has anyone had any success using non-SB sound cards in Linux? Specifically, are there any alternatives better than SB in quality and features?
Of course, if they're aren't any, then that must be why SB is got a nice chunk of the market.
Creative's days of better-stronger-faster are numbered.
Intel can't get away with it any more than Creative can, I believe, and it won't be long before Creative will have to start advertising real features consumers want, rather than how many speakers the card powers, or how man kHz sampling it's capable of. Noone who is not doing professional audio work NEEDS anything better than 44 kHz. Screech if you want, but who can tell the difference?
Eventually, how high the sampling number is for a sound card is going to cease to be meaningful, if it hasn't already. As it is, I find the Soundblaster Live has TOO MANY features for my needs, which involve good stereo sound, and the ability to capture CD audio, and play it back.
Now, seriously. Are we falling into the trap of just upgrading sound cards for the sake of doing it, because that's what people 'do' with PCs? Unless you're putting in a Dolby 5.1 system, for heavens sakes, for your computer, I just can't see the point here.
Unless you like DRM protected audio.
A review that looks like this:
- The (click for page 2)
- Audigy2 (click for page 3)
- soundcard (click for page 4)
- is (click for page 5)
- really (click for page 6)
- cool (click for page 7)
- . (click for page 8)
- ...
And has more ads per square inch than most pr0n sites?No? Oh, look! A black helicopter!!
Today, most motherboards come with integrated sound and most of the newer ones come with digital outs and 5.1 compatible chips. Why would anyone purchase an Audidgy 2? If your an audiophile, you know better than to touch a creative product especially after the crappy digital IO on the Live series. Speaking of the live series, the drivers are simply horrendous. Talk about bloat, I bought an Audigy for the front firewire, and the drivers are ridiculous. You can't download just a barebones driver and when you do install the full CD setup, creative tries to take over your system even if you do a minimal install.
So why should anyone purchase an Audigy 2? Especially considering that it has DRM and worst drivers I've encountered. Creative has abused their strong position in the soundcard market for too long and has failed to deliver products that meet their customers needs. Now, almost all motherboards comes with audio that is perfectly adequate for gamers and basic AV work. If you need to do anything more(audiophiles), creative is not a good choice anyway.
Bloated software, annoying DRM and uber-annoying splashscreens, all for the priviledge to be offerred another soundcard to end all soundcards a year later-all Creative soundcard trademarks since the Live! My new NForce2 board with built-in Dolby Digital (Nforce APU) really does sound better than my Audigy did, uses less resources, has no compatability/performance issues with DirectX and with no card, blocks less circulatory air.
Do new consumer cards solve this problem, or do they layer up useless extra features?
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
I held out for the A2 Platinum Ex like a good little audiophile, and I am very happy with it in most areas. I do some home recording with some pretty decent instruments, so I wanted to make sure I could do 24/96 recording through S/PDIF. So far so good. I couldn't justify getting a real pro recording sound card, since I still use my computer for gaming and such. A2 Platinum Ex was my "good recording/good gaming" compromise, and it is less expensive than a true musician's card.
:-)
Good speakers can be a mixed blessing. They make a good signal sound great, but they also make a mediocre signal sound awful. I had Logitech's THX 4.1 system hooked up to the motherboard's AC-97 before I got the A2. It took me weeks to get the EQ to sound good. The A2, out of the box with no EQ tweaks, blew away my highly tweaked AC-97 sound. I was so happy! The signals, especially on the low end, are much cleaner than the AC-97. Bass lines that used to be way too boomy are now clean and crisp, yet still powerful.
The audio inputs are the A2's greatest improvement over a stock card. With AC-97, things I recorded rarely sounded the same on playback. A2 is simply excellent in this respect. I am able to get a mix that sounds virtually indistinguishable from some professionally recorded cd's. It's not 100% perfect, but what do you expect out of a consumer-grade card and an inexperienced recording engineer?
The one kicker is that Linux support is virtually non-existant. *grr* I haven't been able to get one peep out of it in RedHat 8 (flame away), and I refuse to pay $40 for a third party driver. So much for pathos.
Bottom line: Audiophiles, aspiring musicians, home theater buffs, this card is for you. You will need good speakers to make the most of your experience, so beware. We're talking about a very pricey upgrade. But if you appreciate great sound, I promise you will not be disappointed.
Most folks, however, will be better served by the stock AC-97 and its plentiful support for both Windows and Linux.
Cheers!
My question is does this board, or ANY SOUND CARD work in a 64bit/ 66mhz / 3.3 volt pci slot like the one that the intel SCB2 "server" boards have. I have not been able to get a clear answer from either creative nor intel... and the last non-compatible card I tried in one of the boxes fried the power supply [yes; repeatable]...
--
Time is on my side
Ya, Since the Audugy came out they have full WDM drivers and are way better than the SB Live drivers. The Audigy 2 drivers are the best so far and haven't caused any issues for me yet.
My dad is a really huge audiophile. He has a very large analog system, but he is slowly adding more digital pieces to the configuration. He is wondering if there are computers (or a list of components) that are geared toward audio junkies? At first glance, I just thought "stick in a CD-RW drive and latest Creative soundcard on the market", but I don't know much about the particular needs of the audio crowd. For those who are in the know, what are the computers/components that best suit this niche?
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
its monstrous red PCB reminds me of the voodoo5-6000.
If you were truly gonna invest in a high bandwidth digital soundsystem, shouldn't the system be doing something like *firewire* sound?
That way you can do pure digital (and no noise) from source (CD or DVD or whatnot) to the speaker (2, 2.1, 3.1, 5.1, 6.1, etc) system?
And when you phrase it that way, doesn't that immediately mean the sound card becomes irrelevant, unless it transforms into the equivalent of a video card, and does digital mixing, resampling, effects, and transforms, while it's left to the speakers to do DAC?
GPL Deconstructed
While I'm sure this is a nice card I have really no need for 24 bit audio in the computer shack. Furthermore, I have some concers reguarding DRM.
/dev/mem
1. Have the MPAA/RIAA forced DRM into the DAC on this card?
2. What about CPU resources, is this card totally stupid and require the CPU to hold its hand in the D/A A/D process? Or is it smart enough to do this on its own.
3. How is support under Linux? I'd hate to plunk down my hard earned cash only to find that it only works under Windows.
4. Is it really worth it to justify replacing my perfectly functioning Sound Blaster Live! card I currently use?
Unless I can think of a reason to use 24 bit 96 KHz audio (other than home theater) I'll just stick with what I have..
yes >
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
stick it to em' AC
what problems have you had with the ASIO drivers? My Audigy 1 based on the older chip has been great, I can get single digit latency in Reason and Cubase, even with a lowly 1.2Ghz Athlon.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
While it's not an innovation unique to sound cards, multi-channel audio is pretty cool. NASCAR Racing with four-speaker surround is hellah immersive.
i'm sure that knocks the spots off my m-audio delta 1010 .
(10 channels of simultaneous balanced analog input and 10 of output, all running at 24 bit 96khz)
I certainly agree on that much, kinda...
I have never liked Creative, they're as M$ sa sound hardware can be. But on the other hand I have been quite impressed by the Audigy I picked up. I wanted to get a MontegoII, but couldn't get one across here (UK), so in the end I caved and picked up the Audigy instead (I needed a replacement second soundcard since my 128 with the Yamaha GX daughterboard died, for mixing and music purposes) and the sound quality is the best I've heard yet. Given I'm pumping my soundcards (Live and Audigy) through a mixing desk and good quality 100watt amp, quality all the way through is fairly important, especially when recording the output to get a mix. So on that front I think i'll probably get round to replacing the Live with an Audigy 2, since the Live is noticably worse than the Audigy, and is now essentially my bottleneck.
Also, the EAX advanced is quite nice in gaming. The games it works with (Mafia, SOFII among others) sound beautiful. Mafia it makes souns remarkably like you are driving through a town, helped by the superb sound work that went into said game. The acclusion programming gives it a great help (nice smooth transitions between say outdoors and driving into a warehouse with echos that sound right, also noticable in GTA3), and SOFII it gives similarly great effects to. It just adds that bit extra to a good game. Playing it with e volume up really high you really do notice it. A friend of mine who came over to play SOFII, he'd played it on his machine with a Live, was blown away by the sound quality and effects.
Also it can finally support Aureal A3D, which I have to use in iL2Sturmovik, since for some reason it doesn't like using EAXAdvanced (although I will retry it since I've just reinstalled with the latest drivers, and patched iL2 to it's latest version).
All in all, if your machine can get on with it, it's a great card, but Creative and their support suck so bad that it's a bit of a minefield whether it'll work.
I am aware that there's a team who made a third party driver for the Audigy, the kxproject. Whether it can now support EAX however I'm not sure of since I ended up not having to use it. But it's worth taking a look at.
this seems ok, but when i go to college i, like many students, will be using a laptop. but i want to have a good surround sound system to plug into in my dorm room and possibly do some rudimentary guitar recording. is the SB extigy any good? are there other solutions like it that run on usb or firewire on a laptop? game performance is not the #1 concern (that's why god created the xbox and ps2)
I want more DRM! "The Digital Output is always active except when playing DRM encoded content, at which point it is disabled. This is a requirement of DRM support otherwise the Audigy 2 would simply not be able to play DRM encoded content, e.g. DVD-Audio, as would be the case for other non-supporting soundcards." Isn't it nice.
Free speech is getting expensive...
I heard a lot of problem and limited support for this card on http://opensource.creative.com/'s Web site and forum.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Just a couple of weeks ago, I picked up an Audigy 2 at Best Buy. 10 days later I returned it and picked up a new burner and some RAM.
Why?
I have had two problems with Creative's cards. The first one, and most annoying for me, is that they lock up. I don't know if this is a hardware or driver issue, but I've experienced this with an AWE-32, PCI-128, and most recently the Audigy. All three were completely different computers and operating systems (P-166, Win95; AMD 233, Win98; PIII-800, Win2k).
When I brought the Audigy home, I was impressed. Metal jacks that probably wouldn't break as easily as the colored plastic ones. A firewire port. An alleged 106db S/N ratio.
With some testing, it lived up to the S/N ratio quite nicely, and I was surprised. Output levels were in the "semi-pro" range, eg, it drove my mixer's meter right to 0db easily. No hard drive/video/network interference in the output or input.
But even despite all of this, if I fire up a playlist in WinAmp and just let it run, it will lock up randomly. It usually crops up after a few hours of continuous play, but it's done this in as little as 30 minutes. From that point on, the card is effectively dead until you power-cycle. Same exact behavior I had with their previous products.
Now on to the second issue I have with the company (but not related to the Audigy). Twice -- in two different eras -- I have bought what I thought to be a Creative Labs card, but it turned out to be a relabeled card from a company they bought out.
First was back in 1995 or '96, allegedly an SB16. The card was actually an Aztech Sound Galaxy 16.
Second was a PCI-128, I was lucky enough to get an Ensonique card (that I've found to be a good card anyway, works well in the Linux box).
I'm fed up with Creative Labs, and Voyetra/Turtle Beach isn't much better (no Win2k support for older Montego II cards, which I own 3). So I'm now using two no-name external USB devices, which (if you don't care about "3D" or MIDI) give great PCM playback quality, low S/N ratio (being external to the PC), and hot-swappability.
So... am I the only one who thinks Creative Labs sucks?
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
I would have to go to BestBuy to find this out.
Closest useful sounds I get are "idiot dings" (like, for hitting the backspace when there is nothing to erase in the command line prompt). Those at least try to be useful, but they aren't. They're annoying. (Hold down backspace to erase text. Get lots of dings between time of last text gone and backspace key released.) I do not want to disturb the entire office with the computer equivalent of ringing cellphones. I don't want to hear it either.
set bell-style none
In some games, they at least try to make sound informative. Sometimes it is. It's good to be able to hear the monster sneaking up behind you. Not informative is sound such as theme music. Nice the first few times, but even digitally enhanced super high fidelity stereo surround sound gets old fast. I can hear it on the average sound system just fine. And I sure don't need the theme for Region X continuously playing to tell me I'm in Region X. After 15 repetitions of the same 1 minute jingle, wouldn't you turn it off?
So the only use for a fancy sound card is for heavy duty audio work? If I'm not a musician and not interested in editing audio, this is useful how? My MP3's and CDs played in the CD-ROM sound fine with my motherboard's built in "CMedia" sound.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
- 24 bit gives a SNR of 144dB. How many people have mikes and/or baffles with such a quality ? 24bit is useless unless maybe for processing, in order not to lose significant digits, but that should be in pure software. Case dismissed.
- Your ears filter out anything above 20kHz. Make it 24 kHz for the so called golden ears. Therefore according to nyquist anything above 48 kHz is useless. Case dismissed
- .
Soundcard manufacturers just don't want you to buy an el cheapo 10$ soundcard, basically the only added value since the SB16 is some extra voices, but that extra bits/samples per second are PR BS.I've used an Audigy ex platinum yadda yadda yadda 2 on a Win XP box, and although maybe a little overpriced I was happy with its performance. It wouldn't fit into a 'pro' studio but for anything up to that point it's nice..
On the issue of Linux Latency there are many resources around the web helping you knock it down even further. A good start is Oreilly.
Whenever an article says "[PRODUCTNAME] 2 is what [PRODUCTNAME] should have been" I begin to feel ill.
what does all the kilohertz mean?
24-Bit/96-kHz/192kHz ?
What's wrong with Grok? I use Grok all the time -- and I never say fsck instead of fuck.
"They're" is a contraction of "they are". So, according to you, the sentence should read, "They mentioned they are extremely high selling live cards too."
It makes sense if you thought that he was saying that the Audigy cards were extremely high selling.
I misunderstood what he was trying to say.
At $50k per name, they probably made enough to be in coke and hookers forever. There were a *lot* of dot-bombs, and lots of established companies decided to change their names (PWC Consulting -> Monday).
Because Creative will come out with some kind of BS excuse as to why they can't make drivers for your 2 year old product that support your new OS or Game. They suck up cpu like nobody's business (Where are the audio performance benchmarks, anyway?) and well, Snap, Crackle, Pop anyone?
I just ordered this card last week, and am waiting for it to arrive. Newegg had a deal on the card last week, so I got it for only marginally more than the original Audigy, I guess thats a plus. So, /. is 6 months late overall, but only a few days late for me. Oh well.
It's been out for months. I mean comeon! Maybe you should start posting some 3.06GHz Hyperthreading articles as if the processors are brand new.
If you have concerns about DRM, then simply do not buy DRM enabled media. This has nothing at all to do with Creative's sound card. DVD-Audio and SACD are DRM enabled and no player anywhere has digital output for these formats. (Actually, I think there are a couple that do, but they're proprietary. ie you have to have the corresponding device from the same manufacturer on the other end, which is really not much better.) There's no spec for digital output of DRM technologies because they don't want it. Duh. Again, nothing to do with the sound card. So just don't buy SACDs or DVD-Audio. Personally, I think there's way too much noise (audio as well as electrical) in computer systems to bother putting a high end sound card in them anyways. I get really nasty 60Hz hum from my sub when I plug my Live card into my receiver. TimeZone
Sony's most excellent Lissa does, and I've seen MOTU's rackmount firewire audio gear, which seems to chew up and spit out multiple tracks, and doesn't really dent the CPU (which is important when capturing and altering the stream).
If I could just go straight from the firewire bus on my iBook to my stereo, and miss all the electrical noise it makes (or at least have it error-checked), it would be cool...
Are there Linux drivers for this new card that let you access all the features? Can you get the 5.1 and such from in from within Linux? I'm looking for a decent high end card for a multimedia computer to put in with my AV system...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
96 KHz is often more than enough to deal with simple analog circuits. And 24 bits of precision is insane. Screw the Audigy, I just want the ADC chip!
This poking out of one of you 5.25" bays, whilst easy, has more effect than lots of the smaller case-mods I've seen :)
Creative has good business sense, but their products are pricy and not particularly impressive.
The last real "innovation" in the soundcard market was the tech war war that started to pick up between Aureal and Creative. Then that died, and wavetracing (which looked really interesting) went away. And now we have reverbs. Whee.
Most of the functionality on a modern soundcard is pretty useless. MIDI? Anyone still using MIDI can do it on a modern computer in software much better (and use far higher quality soundfonts). "Spatializer"? Makes audio distorted and sound awful. Hardware mixing? *Only* useful to Linux users, and *only* because the sound systems suck under Linux and there's no good software mixing system (esd sucks, artsd sucks more, and JACK isn't general-purpose). Mixing several audio streams is cheap, cheap, cheap on a modern processor. Hardware reverbs? Mostly a gimmick.
There's a reason integrated sound motherboards are becoming the norm. Almost no one needs anything else.
May we never see th
First off, USB speakers have indeed been created (Microsoft had some), but the problem is the inherant issues with USB itself. High resource usage, bandwidth usage with multiple devices on the same bus, etc...
The problem is that USB 1 didn't support bandwidth allocation. Which saved 2 cents per device, and made life suck for everyone else. USB 2 and Firewire both allow bandwidth allocation.
May we never see th
Any company that dupes the customer into thinking they are getting one product when they are getting another is just bait and switch at the factory. I bought those drives on reviews I read, I will never buy a creative product again. I like this phillips siesmic edge is doing just fine in my windows box, and my linux box gets by with ac97.
This, incidently, is par for the course for their entire product line. Creative constantly puts in cheaper parts over the lifetime of each of their products. When you get a Sound Blaster Live Value, say, you have *no* idea what's in there. They went through a ton of revisions and parts. Once they've got their good reviews, they can start cheapening the thing up.
May we never see th
I have a M-Audio card that's powering my home theater. I will never use a creative card.
The first hint is when I stopped playing a digital source, yet my receiver still showed a signal present (hiss). Hello Creative?
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
I use it with a clavinova digital piano. Specs: P4 2.8 1 gig of ram Cubase VST with Halion (1 gig synth of steinway B) Windows XP Using the creative driver I get horrible sounds, cracks and pops, the works. With the halion driver I get crappy latency but the sounds DO play.
P4 2.8
1 Gig of RAM
Windows XP
Halion/Cubase
I get consistant clicking and popping under the creative driver. It works under the VST default ASIO driver, but the latency is horrible.
The product reviewed is months old now. The Audigy Platinum eX is the card that has just been released which allows for ASIO 2 recording/playback.
a ti num_ex/welcome2.asp
3 /A udigy2_2ex/index.php
http://www.soundblaster.com/products/audigy2_pl
a review on the NEW card:
http://www.nordichardware.com/reviews/audio/200
// The fastest Alt-Tab in the West
Soundblaster used to be my sound card of choice but now that I have moved to Mac w/ OS X i am amazed that they do not support it. If I buy another Windows PC I surely would pass on Soundblaster because of their lack of driver support.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
The Audigy 2 is good for people who mostly use Windows, mostly play games and want to do some amateur home-recording. If you don't want to do the home-recording an SBLive 5.1 still works fine, but other brands of soundcards have a hard time matching the features and prices of Creative cards (I love the soundfont support, myself).
----
The Audigy's bass, if there was any, was barely audible, and yet whenever I turned up the volume via the software, I'd get horrible clipping. I tried everything to fix this, and I couldn't. It just sucked, no matter what I did. Add to this the fact that I could only use the Audigy in Windows, since there were no free drivers for FreeBSD (my other OS of choice), and I eventually tossed the Audigy in favor of my Live. Needless to say, I won't be buying another Creative Labs sound card anytime soon.
fyi
http://oui.com.br/nando/essays/t03audigy01.htm
also
http://www.ethanwiner.com/audigy.html (under the subheading 'And now for the flaws')
Plus several others I haven't found relevant articles for.
These problems STILL exist, and it's been over a year since the Audigy was released. Apparently, these problems also exist on the Audigy2. Creative say they've been trying to fix these issues, but seem to introduce even more bugs for each new driver they release.
I have been on Creative's back for over 6 months, with nearly each reply telling me that it's an issue with my settings. They finally admitted in November that they have a real issue on their hands here, but have still failed to address it.
I own an Audigy Platinum and vow that it will be the last Creative card I will ever buy. A company that cannot put forward a decent regression test plan for their drivers doesn't deserve my business.
Sorry, but I tried the Herc Game Theater and it was HORRIBLE. This was back in the day when the SB Live! didn't work well on SMP systems. I went around trying all sorts of cards: Hercules, Aureal, Diamond... nothing worked very well. I even popped in my trusty SB16 with Roland wavetable daughter card! I thought that would be fine. I was shocked at how bad the SNR was on that thing.
I ended up going back to the Live. After two months farting around with different cards, Creative finally fixed the SMP problems with the Live drivers. No I use the Audigy and it works great. Sounds great. Less filling.
I play my q 10 oggs over a coax digital transport to my amp and have a pretty rocking integrated sound system.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
The Audigy and Audigy 2 are full bus-mastering PCI cards, while the SBLive was not. The result is that many 2-3 year old VIA chipset mobos have problems with output crackling (and other distortions) when using an SBLive on a busy system. (Other chipsets have the issue as well, it's just impossible to ignore with certain VIA chipsets.)
Aside from bus mastering, the Audigy 2 Platinum can actually accept the SPDIF feeds under Win2K/XP, while the SBLive software didn't, doesn't, and will likely never work with SPDIF inputs once you stop running Win9x.
The rest of the "features" are just marketing crap to put on the box in hopes of suckering someone into wasting money. The only way the audio quality could be made "audiophile" is to feed pure digital from the card to a real surround sound amplifier, but it sounds like you lose the DVD-Audio playback when doing so. The RF interference in a computer case, relatively unstable power supplies, and use of chip amps make me laugh when I see companies claim "audiophile" sound quality for a sound card.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
How come creative does not yet support ASIO drivers? I guess they never will for some reason. Also, Directsound and most apps still only do 48K/16bps PCM right? Maybe I'm wrong about the directsound support, but I know most applications don't yet use directsound except for games and all pro apps use ASIO... making the audigy 2 a little not worth it.
Just an FYI, the protocol for digital output over coax or optical that the creative speakers as was as audigy and audigy2, etc. all use 5.1 PCM. This is separate and distinct from linear PCM and AC-3. 5.1 PCM is an older protocol that was used on early discreet surround sound systems. Dolby then came along with AC-3 which became the industry standard. There are probably licensing issues which is why creative chose not to use AC-3. All surround sound GENERATED BY THE PC will be sent in this format, which is why, when you hook your audigy up to your surround stereo you will most likely only get the front two channels (your stereo will interpret the signal to be linear PCM because it doesn't understand 5.1 PCM) You will be able to play digital surround dvds, because the signal is not created by the computer, but rather simply passed from the dvd through the SPDIF connector into your stereo where it is decoded into the 6 separate channels. As I mentioned earlier all the Creative speaker systems can understand 5.1 PCM, so they will work properly with the audigy2. In addition, you may find that a few very old and/or very expensive surround sound receivers can handle 5.1 PCM (very old as in before AC-3 became the standard and very expensive as in you pay enough, you'll get something that can handle every type of digital format under the sun) ANyway, just thought that was of interest to some.
l8a,
th0th
"BadTimes will make you fall in love with a penguin" - Laika
Followed the link you provided -- pretty nice for studio monitors.
But try using a few 0.25 inch stereo jack to RCA jack adapters, and run good cables to a real stereo. Nothing like a few watts of pure class A to improve the audio quality... *g*
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm an audiophile on a tight budget. Some things to know about sound cards: Unless you have speakers that cost at least $200/pair (and a receiver/amplifier), you probably won't hear any difference between the $33 SB Live and the Audigy series. The SB Live has a S/N ratio of 94dB, the Audigy 100dB, Audigy2 106dB, M-Audio's Revolution 7.1 107dB. The Revolution is cheaper than the Audigy2, better sound, and works on both PC and Macintosh. M-Audio's Revolution is better AND cheaper. And to elaborate on the above, the weak link in most people's stereos (and computers) is the speakers--by a kilometer. Your speakers SHOULD cost more than your receiver.
It's MUCH cheaper to get hi fidelity with headphones. A great buy is Radio Shack's PRO-35 (made by KOSS actually) which cost $40 but go on sale for $20 every 3 months. They have a 3.5mm (1/8 inch) stereo plug, a long cord with volume control, Neodymium magnets (much stronger=much louder & better fidelity), titanium-layered diaphragms, and a frequency response of 15-25,000 Hz (20-20,000 -3 dB). All headphones claim 20-20K response, but without the dB drop rating, the claim is meaningless. The PRO-35s sound amazing, & plenty loud even with a $30 Walkman powered by 2 AA cells. I have purchased and returned many other headphones by Sony, Panasonic, etc. with the same printed specifications, but they don't even come close, which is odd, because Sony & Panasonic normally have the superior product. I always use "Fallen Angel" (track 2) from King Crimson's "Red" album as a test because of it's very low bass at the beginning of the song (and I know from experience how it should sound).
The past sure is tense. --Captain Beefheart
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -MIT Ling
I bought a SoundBlaster Audigy card the last time that I upgraded my computer. I thought that Creative would have learned the lessons from making the SB 64, 128, and Live! cards, but no. My SoundBlaster Audigy makes a huge pop sound whenever the system is powered on or off. The sound also sometimes goes away while playing certain games. The AWE 32 Gold really was the last great Creative sound card -- trust those other posters who say so, they know it.
If it was not for the fact that Aureal went out of business. and driver support under Windows 2000 and XP was so poor (or at least was the last time I knew), I would have never stopped using the Diamond MX300 Audigy 2 chipset based cards that I have. I even use one of the two cards that I have on my GNU/Linux desktop, which gives fantastic sound!
As a systems administrator who is often purchasing hardware, Creative as a company does a really poor job. The driver nightmare is the worst. You find one of their cards, it has a model number on it, and the Creative website fails to list it -- it is like they don't support it. Sometimes you can find the product by name, but finding the drivers that you need on their website is a terrible. Just figuring out what product you have based upon their model numbers is a real challenge.
Creative sound cards are heavy on the marketing. What the hell can the justification for a consumer, NOT professional (Ask a pro, they will tell you, Creative = bad) sound card that costs over $80 be?
Creative is a really good example of a company marketing strategy though. They have really managed to build a demand for a product. It is like printing money, once you convince people that your product is worth more than it really is for the sake of status or whatever the reason is that people continue to buy Creative sound cards.
God, I love it when some Windows-using goober gets fucked over by Microsoft technologies.
With the exception of a _FEW_ people who _MAY_ be doing real/commercial level audio work with these things - What gain does it offer the rest of us?
I can just see it now - I can play my MP3 Collection through this thing so I can hear all the loss in the compression methods. YUCK!
This is simialr to HDTV debacle - where's the source? And who's got the rest of the equipment for the (limited) source to be heard properly?
I have one of these in my new workstation that I built a month ago (as well as their Creative Inspire 6600 6.1 speakers), all I can say is that it's a great piece of hardware :)
:)
The 'Audigy drive' you get with the Platinum is great too (I own an Audigy Platinum as well, so I knew what I needed.) It gives me a great place to plug in headphones complete with independant volume control. And it even has TOSLink optical out for my MD player
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I don't see how DVD-Audio support is a "massive benefit" to any product line. The recording industry would love a new standard that they could charge more for. It must be considerably more expensive to produce albums with 5.1 channels, which raises the barrier of entry to the business and protects the big 5 from competition. Good thing they'll all be bankrupt before most people lose their minds and decide that they want to pay 20 bucks for 5.1 channels of Britney Spears.
well that was part of my point about hating Creative and their support!
Unless KXproject have done any linux work for the emu10kx's.
But as i say, I've had no need to check up on it for a while.
DVD-Audio may be the last hope for the recording industry. So they are going to make sure it is the perfect platform for generating revenue.
:). It will take a few years for anyone to come up with a codec that can fit 90% of the quality of a DVD-Audio disc in a file that can be shared easily.
CD quality audio is a lost cause. It can be massively compressed to the point where it can be shared on the internet easily. There is no built-in DRM which means that all later attempts at security must be bolted on. These attempts are either incompatible with many players or easily circumvented (or both).
DVD-Audio is too big to copy to a CD bit-for-bit (don't tell the recording industry that recordable DVDs are going to be very cheap very soon
To complete this perfect format DRM must be built-in, and apparently the licensing agreement for the codec is the mechanism.
Sure it's THX certified!
... ?
You didn't think creative was going to spend all that money investing in THX if it wasn't going to use it, do you?
How long before THX becomes more like a brand name than a technical rating
The SB Live as I remember it came out *after* the Aureal Vortex which was a market leader with 3D positional sound at the time. And Aureal had a (buggy closed source)linux driver, and it was cheaper than the SB Live, so that's what I got.
After much heartache and kernel recompiling I finally got the Vortex to mostly work in Linux. It was fine in Windows - until the last year or so.
Since Aureal went bust and was bought out by Creative, newer Windows games (like Warcraft 3) have stopped supporting the Aureal 3D sound sytem. (by crashing and locking up outright...)
Along the way I bought some Yamaha USB speakers to run off the sound card, but have since ripped the sound card out and now operate on USB only.
So now my Win games work and get this - Mandrake 8.0 (if it ain't broke don't fix it) detected the USB speakers out of the box with no configuration whatsever! I'm a happy camper.
I only have a 2+1 speaker setup and don't need a fancy hi-fi card. I'd like to run a sound card again because it lets me run sound through my big hi-fi amp (this rocks) at the other side of the room. But to have to go out and blow more money on another card like the SB Live that is no better technically than an Aureal really sucks! And due to Creatives mishandling of the Aureal debacle I'm not going to buy another Creative product out of principle.
What's a guy to do? At least I never bought a beta VCR!
I have been reading this tread and seems like just one long series of people who have been knoking the card and don't even own one.
I would like to say that the the card is not as bad as most are saying. The drivers have improved greatly over the past few months and I have had no problems with crashes. The output from the card is clean and clear and has a much better dynamic range then older cards (SB PCI). DVD audio works as advertised and the surround sound works perfect.
I am not saying the card is perfect though, for one there is no real linux support. Also, the driver's interface is bloated and could be optimized a lot, but it still work just fine on my system. Over all I have been very satifyed with this card.
Just remember, just because a artical likes a product by a company that you might not, dosen't mean the artical is just restating the marketing. It might actuly be a good product.
makes you ALL dorks.
NT.
2) Drivers? DOS drivers? No such thing. Winders drivers?
3) So who needs FD? You could've added the DB16 which included a Crystal Semi 4231. FD was available. The stock GUS had no such DSP, but more like a bunch of ASICs and a 16-bit DAC (and an 8-bit ADC). Software is what made it perform, but few were capable of doing software for it, and the SDK 1.0 was basic, and the 2.0x still not there. You had to do it yourself to get it going good. Later GUSes bore little resemblance to the original, red-RCP GUS, and include W3x drivers, and possibly even beta W95. AW32 came not long after the GUS, maybe less than a year after.
--------
Re:AWE 32 (Score:4, Informative) by msaulters (130992) on Monday March 17, @02:45PM (#5531048) Good Point. Only reasons I'm not still using my old GUS: 1) it was ISA 2) driver compatibility issues 3) was not full-duplex, inasmuch as I can recall.
try using the CL drivers with the VIA low latency patch (this is a third party patch that fixes a lot of the PCI timing issues present in many VIA motherboards).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
or maybe you're just dumb.
Sorry, I fail to see your logic here. You claim the 24-bit samples make more sense, but for what reason? They merely increase the granularity of the dynamic range. Personally, I have no issues with the dynamic range on a CD (16-bit samples). Often, the dynamic range has been expanded so much, it helps to compress it so that the softer sounds are at least somewhat audible.
However, increasing the sample rate to 96kHz brings the audio vastly closer to the analog domain where there is no upper limit on the frequency. Because of harmonics and other phenomenon, it's quite desirable to increase the sample rate as much as possible.
Of course, this is a Sound Buster card, so there's not much to say. To Creative, 96 kHz 24-bit is just fancy talk for "buy me 'cause my numbers are high". And Creative's customers will happily shell out the dough for this card and they'll actually think they can hear the difference between 44.1 kHz and 96 kHz on their shitty computer speakers.
And you get a free motherboard too.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
Whenever somebody starts talking about bloaty, worthless software, I immediately think of the HP Officejet v40 my parents bought.
The printer itself is pretty sweet. But the first thing the enclosed instructions tell you to do is pop their CD into the computer. It pops up with a single dialog button that says "Click here to install software," then throws about 300-400 megabytes of stuff into a couple of directories. When you reboot, you have shortcuts galore on your desktop, new things in your system tray... it was ugly.
When I reinstalled Windows on their computer, I didn't reinstall anything for the printer, and yet it works like a dream.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Creative stopped being "the standard" when "Soundblaster compatible" cards were no longer an issue.
Creative has one thing going for them. They have the largest penetration of the OEM market, at least on computers that aren't totally budget grade. Even now you see the old Ensoniq chips in VIA integrated boards. Frankly, Creative's products have been blow the competition for years. I'm not sure why people keep buying them. Turtle Beach, Hercules, even Philips have all had better cards.
I agree about the Yamaha thing though. They're cheap and have hardware, real-time mixing. That is the best thing that you can have in Linux.
Those headphones sound great. I couldn't find the actual product you named (PRO-35) on Radioshack's site, but is this the same thing? They seem similar, but I know so pitifully little about audio gear. Thanks!
Managed to find them on Koss' site. Looks like their normal price is $20. Thanks for the recommendation.
Fuck, the new Unreal 2 has broken EAX support. Turn it on, and you'll have random crashes (ok, not so random) every couple of minutes.
Thanks!