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.

Wishlist

[skroz]

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.

What's wrong with Live!?

[Xenopax]

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 is outdated.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 is more than enough, so I would argue that it is not aging, outdated, or whatever else you want to call it.

why is this here?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the review doesn't cover anything related to open source why should I care? Almost all hardware out there will work with windows, that's not the case in *nix.

The Santa Cruz is a better card anyway. WHQL drivers for all versions of windows, less system resources are used, and the sound quality is far better.

Re:What's wrong with Live!?

[Tet]

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.

Which is why I have Soundblaster PCI128s in all of my machines. Unlike a new grpahics card, where you can see the difference, to me, a cheap sound card doesn't sound significantly different to a top of the range one, so why bother? 3D audio? More of a marketing gimmick than genuinely useful. My oggs sound fine in normal stereo, as does Serious Sam. I'm not a professional musician, so I don't need huge banks of stored sounds, or heavy duty MIDI control, so why would I need to spend a 3 figure sum on a soundcard?

Live is *aging*?

[Junta]

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...

Re:That is pretty narrow-minded

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, when a manufacturer does this
I usually vote with my feet. I'll have
to look into the Santa Cruz card someone
else mentioned.

Re:What's wrong with Live!?

[IronChef]

Many people with good enough stereos to care will have digital inputs anyway. Even the lowly Live! can output a digital stream for the people who want to listen to their games & MP3s on the home theater system.

Sure, if you use crummy speakers

[CausticPuppy]

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!