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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."
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!
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.
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!
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...
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
I would like to see more games built in surround sound, not more cards.
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...
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
The Mbox from Digidesign is pretty nice too, altho Win/mac only. All do 24/96 without breaking a sweat.
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.
Whilst its not just there yet on the studio production level with its internal DAC's would it not be most effective as such with its digital out and a comercial DAC! Lets face it if your realy realy serious about recordings then you would do everything digitaly and then when you need that lovely analogue sound then just use the digital output's that have been around since day 1 of the live series and an external DAC. Most hifi shops sell such audiophile components and combined with a nice soundcard and latest PC power. Then it still boils down to the ability of the user to work within the interface bounds they are given. Soundblaster cards have always had there quirks but like the microsoft operating system there fairly common/standard and they are known quirks and workarounds. All this screaming for the perfect dB rating of the outputs and frequency range tetc etc its pointless when you can work totaly digitaly even down to burning onto CD and digitaly outputing the signal to an external DAC. Anybody who has botherd to have speakers worthy of such a quality output will think nothing if not already have an external DAC for the CD player, with its advantage that it cuts down on interferance from the rest of the CD player/components. What I'd like to see is an external firwire connected soundcard that is mainly software based with external DAC for output and the money spent there. Todays PC's are more than capable of doing alot of the work instead of an onboard DSP and a fast connection to an external breakout box with audio in/out and digital in/out etc would be all that is effectivly required from a user. the main cost of such a device would be in software and the hardware costs would be very comparable to todays kit even with a top end DAC included. Still I suspect that most people just play games and use headphones and play mp3's so the quality aspect whilst a plus is not exactly on there priority given there speaker/amp situation and the source of the materal there playing. Everybody I know that does anything else with there soundcard use a soundblaster or some top end unheard of brand and are more than happy. Remeber its a home PC soundcard not RADIO FM's main broadcast headend, though I suspect that it would be more than capable of the job without the external DAC without going to the expense of a £1000+ specilist card like a digigram.
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!!
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.
You could upgrade to the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card.
IMO, Sensaura's 3D positional audio is vastly superior to the Creative stuff and makes a huge difference with first person games. Really good drivers as well.
And for the price, there's simply no comparison whatsoever.
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.........
Ahh.. you youngsters.. I bought my first soundcard to play Wolfenstine on my 386 sx16. It was a Mediavision Thunderboard 8 bit mono sound card. After a year or so I got a Pro Audio Spectrum 16, followed by a Diamond Monster Sound MX200, SB128, and finally a CMI8738. Strangely enough, I still have all those old cards.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
The dsp chip affects the CPU usage of the card and the DSP effects the card can produce, but has no effect whatsoever on sound quality.
For sound quality, the DA/AD converters, output/input opamps, power supply regulation, and other analog components are the only parts that matter.
And what 10K speakers have you heard? I own the sennheiser HD-600 ($300) and while they do beat good speakers in that price range, there's no way they are comparable to $10000 speakers. I'm guessing that you own the 495's or 497's which are comparable to a good $400 bookshelf monitor speakers, nothing more.
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
I don't believe people are making clones, so I can't figure out why they'd have any justification to do this. I mean, so someone downloads the damn driver. Do they really think that that person *doesn't* have the card? Or is it just that their installer is so bloated that they don't want to pay for the bandwidth.
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...
I've always wondered about this. There seems to be this big trend in "utility" software to hacked-up bitmapped interfaces. Why, why do companies do this? It looks tremendously unprofessional, it's a pain to use (Well, this menu works sort of like in Windows, and on this one you can't read the text well...).
There's also a move towards huge installers. For chrissake, it's a drive. All people want is for the damn thing to work. Creative feels like it hired a ton of programmers, and couldn't find anything for them to do except write low-quality pack-in software. People want the 200KB driver. A control panel? Maybe another 200KB on top of it, if a logo is included, etc, etc. There shouldn't be any reason for anything else.
Creative does this. The Razor Boomslang guys do this. Matrox doesn't do the bitmapped thing, but does pack loads of extra crap in with their drivers.
May we never see th
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.