Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Reviewed 377
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."
DRM? (Score:5, Interesting)
AWE 32 (Score:5, Interesting)
creative drivers still suck (Score:4, Interesting)
I love the Audigy Ex (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Hacked BIOS? (Score:1, Interesting)
Most of the functionality is in a
Re:Dear slashdot.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Excellent, but buy the budget card. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Still not there. (Score:4, Interesting)
2496? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:DRM? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the only DVD-Audio or SACD player on the market capable of outputting a digitial audio signal (the article is wrong).
Of course the only thing that would be able to recieve this signal would be the 49Txi itself, but someone has to start somewhere to get high-end digital audio directly to the amplifier.
Actually, with a firewire audio output and a receiver that accepts firewire input, you wouldn't even need a soundcard... Anyone wanna try to write a device driver that can play audio through firewire???
Re:Audio cards (Score:4, Interesting)
The Mbox from Digidesign [digidesign.com] is pretty nice too, altho Win/mac only. All do 24/96 without breaking a sweat.
I have a prediction... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Progress (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
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!!
Why bother? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sound Cards, the SB-Live-Audigy upgrade train. (Score:2, Interesting)
You could upgrade to the Turtle Beach [turtlebeach.com] Santa Cruz [turtle-beach.com] card.
IMO, Sensaura [sensaura.com]'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.
Re:+'s and third party drivers to remedy creative' (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:SB16 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Audio cards (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Great card, but the Software's Annoying... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:AWE 32 (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not that bad (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:DRM? (Score:2, Interesting)
this new product is always "the ultimate" as in "we were so stupid until now but we really got it right this time. we don't know the concept of upgrade and if you bought our shit until know we sincerely trust you're stupid to do so from now on even though we all know that each new time you buy you only pay 10% for new things we added and 90% for shit you already had and hence payed for but hey we always hungry"
DRM is really a piece of shit. the reason it exists is the following:
- piratable product's builders realized that their inability to control the price in whatever way they want is a fat killer. they need to aquire non-piratable status in order to be able to ask for a product much more then it's worth.
imagine that a matter duplicator existed and that you would be able to duplicate hardware (this includes food and women tooscince they clearly see that it is not posible through software only they're trying to create a new generation of hardware that will be able to constrain any software to their will. this is a very dangerous point in the evolution of hardware and I hope that buyers will give this new Sony, Creative etc. hardware the same fate that Intel's identification methode in the CPU recived.
i think it is worth fighting for fat's death through fighting against DRM so i'll give either a big NO or a big Fuck you (*) i know a way around (**)! to any DRM enabled product.
* - Sony & Friends, Microsoft & Friends, RIAA & Friends
** - ATRAC, WMA, DVD, etc.