Better than expected
Written: Jun 15 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great audio quality
Small form factor
Easy Easy Easy
Cons: Requires separate power adapter
The Bottom Line: A great portable solution for high quality audio.
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| jagee's Full Review: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 NX External S... |
I just purchased one of these little Creative Labs Audigy 2 NX units yesterday, and felt strongly enough to write a review as soon as I could. I can not believe the difference between this and even the best built-in computer audio.
My Grado Labs SR-125 headphones have never sounded better - I've been contemplating getting a headphone amplifier and this little gem has made me forget about that. (Note: One thing to consider here is the impedance of your headphones. If you're looking to drive high impedance headphones with this, you probably won't be as enthusiastic as I am - the 5 volt circuit at roughly 2 amperes of power means that my low impedance (32 ohm) headphones can pull plenty of current without distorting. High impedance headphones need plenty of voltage and not so much current, so keep that in mind.)
The installation is simple enough. The applications seem to be fairly complete and unobtrusive - one thing that really bothers me about a lot of multimedia apps anymore is that many of them such as Real Player seem to want to take over your entire system. The software bundled with this does it's job and for the most part transparently in the background from what I've seen so far. The unit does seem to get noticeably warm during use, but not too bad. It's got pretty much just about any input and output type you're likely to want. Some have lamented in the fact that you can't run digital output on DVD audio - true, but to my knowledge, the SPDIF specification doesn't support DVD audio anyway, so I don't really see that as a shortcoming.
As far as system resources go, I've tried it on two different systems now and have yet to notice any appreciable difference on the USB bus, processor load or memory footprint. One system is an Athlon XP 2800+, the other is an Intel P4 3.2GHz, both with plenty of RAM.
I have not tested the recording features of the unit.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99.00
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Epinions.com ID:
jagee
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Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 0 members
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