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."

Dear slashdot....

[Phosphor3k]

Please advertise my un-innovative and slow-selling product for free. Thank you.

Wow! Interesting!

[Anonymous Coward]

A review of a six month old product!

Hip hip hooray!

In other news Earth cools!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

SB16

[crumbz]

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.....

Re:Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never used my favorite sound reproduction system.

I call it PC Speaker.

Get down with the boops and the beeps, yeah!!

Re:SB16

[Malc]

Probably had to remove the CDROM drive or hard drive, or knock a whole in the front of the case too. Those cards were big!

Re:AWE 32

[Snork Asaurus]

Yup. I've been using my AWE32 for 7 years or so. I hope to get good drivers for it any day now.

Re:What a great job

[Chemical]

There was a story on Slashdot about "naming consultants" many many moons ago. They are the people who came up with all those dot-com era company names like "Agilent", "Accenture", and all those other stupid names by basically scouring the dictionary and inventing a new word out of two existing ones. And I think the fee was something like $50k per name.

I'm sure most of the people who went into that line of work are now living under a freeway overpass in a cardboard box.

Re:Audigy2 and Linux don't play well together

[Anonymous Coward]

Use REAL equipment to play REAL music

That's why i have a string quartet play live for me at home

Re:Still happy with the Live! Value

[checkyoulater]

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,

Don't waste your money on a new set of speakers. You get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers.

Sorry, couldn't resist. I love that song.

Re:SB16

[Powercntrl]

Man, I remember putting a SB16 into my 486 dx2 just to play doom.

Am I the only one that thinks the SB16 wasn't such a bad card? I don't mean the late-model single-chip crap ones, I mean the old first generation big ass ISA cards with the Creative/Panasonic (or SCSI if you were lucky) interface on them! I mean they have pretty decent audio quality, an actual 4 watt amplifier so you could use a cheap $10 pair of unamplifed speakers, or plug in your headphones and blast your brains around in your head. The bass, treble and volume settings were not controlled by a DSP mixer, so you had to actually exceed the onboard amplifier to cause distortion. The card had jumpers... None of this bullshit plug and play crap... You plugged it in and it fscking kept its IRQ, DMA and hex address settings. Perfect compatibility with old DOS games, Windows 3.1, OS/2, Linux, and hell even WinXP still!

I mean, seriously... Modern sound cards suck... All the outputs are line-level so if you plug in your headphones you can't hear shit, there's either NO DOS compatibility or drivers that don't work, crash your game, or use almost all of your conventional memory. The volume and tone levels are all digitally controlled inside the DSP... If you max out your EQ or volume and play a MP3 that's been normalized to 99% of the available dynamic range, the stupid DSP will do dynamic range compression on the output. And let's not forget hardware-based wave mixing. The SB16 didn't support it, so if you were listening to a MP3, there'd be no annoying sounds playing over it.

The only thing that sucks about the SB16 is lack of 48KHz playback support... But you know what? I am going to find a way to write my own realtime downsampling driver, I can't hear the difference between 48KHz and 44.1KHz anyway.

It's a shame the fastest motherboard I have that still has ISA is an Asus P2-99. But you know what? With a BIOS update [letol.by.ru] and a slot 1 Tualatin adapter [upgradeware.com], I can upgrade it to 1.4GHz and still keep using my SB16. Muahahahahahahahah! SB16 forever!