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Audigy is Creative's replacement for the hugely successful SoundBlaster Live! series, aimed at three different markets: the gamer, the home cinema buff and the home musician.
The top-end version reviewed here, the Platinum eX, is targeted at musicians, and boasts an extensive software bundle and external connection box with headphone, mic, digital audio and MIDI input/output. Since it shares all the features of the versions aimed at the gamer and DVD fan, it's the logical one to test.
Installation is fiddly, but, once done, operation is a breeze. Creative has included a FireWire controller, although it can only supply two Watts of power, so devices such as external drives will need their own power supply.
In testing, Audigy initially failed to detect a FireWire CD-R when plugged into the external box, but as soon as we plugged it into the sound card's own FireWire socket, it was recognised. From this moment on, it worked connected to either socket.
A DV camcorder was also tested and worked with no problems. Full marks go to Creative for including software to allow two PCs to be connected head-to-head via FireWire for ultra-fast networking.
Creative claims Audigy has four times the processing power of the Live!'s EMU10K1 chip and we see no reason to doubt it. It sports 24bit, 96kHz-capable DACs (Digital to Analog Convertors) previously only seen on pro music I/O cards, although internally it still handles audio streams in 16bit at 48kHz.
But this translates into audibly better performance all round. There's more digital headroom for mixing audio and adding effects, and the overall signal-to-noise ratio is a respectable 100dB, compared with the optimistic claim of 96dB for the latest Live! cards.
Uniquely for a consumer board, Audigy can mix and record multiple inputs simultaneously, all at 16bit/48kHz. It retains the Live! support for sound fonts and hardware sampling, but the 32MB sample set limit has been increased to 223MB.
Most important to the home musician is the quality of the ASIO driver. ASIO is a standard developed by Steinberg to address the problem of latency with sound equipment connected to PCs. In tests, we achieved a latency of less than 2ms in Propellerhead's Reason.
Audigy's main innovation for gamers is called EAX Advanced HD, which includes significant improvements to the existing Environmental Audio eXtensions (EAX) 2.0 standard seen in the Live! cards. Audigy can process four different audio environments at the same time. If the game character is standing in a carpeted room, for example, listening to footsteps of someone approaching down a wooden-floored corridor, while gunshots ring outside, each of the external sounds will have its own environmentally sensitive reverb, which will in turn be affected by the room the character is in. This should make game environments more convincing, especially since these effects can be panned around the soundstage, too.
For home cinema aficionados, the card offers a remote control, with the option to output front stereo, surround stereo, centre and sub-woofer (5.1) via analog jacks, or digitally via S/PDIF. Creative has built Dolby Digital decoding into the drivers themselves, accessible via a switch in the surround mixer, allowing you to use cheaper DVD software that won't decode 5.1 itself, but has an output function that Audigy can pick up and run with.
We've barely scratched the surface of a product as rich as the Audigy Platinum eX here. It's a major improvement on its predecessor in terms of performance and quality, and certainly the new features give it a good lead where EAX gaming is concerned. It comes with a fabulous bundle of software (see website for details) and as an all-rounder for gamers or musicians beats the pack.
If you don't need the features the external box offers or some of the software bundled, the Platinum eX is overkill: the basic Audigy Player costs less than £90. If all you want is 5.1 DVD playback on multimedia speakers, go for a cheaper card again. But whichever way you look at it, Audigy is the new king of the castle.
Contact
Creative: www.europe.creative.com
See also:
Creative lives up to its name with its new feature-filled sound card. 25 Feb 2002
A newcomer to this market produces an excellent card for DVD and games. 13 Sep 2001All Sound Cards
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