Great sound with Audigy technology
Written: Oct 10 '02 (Updated Oct 10 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great sound with 5.1 speakers, firewire port, supports most sound standards, works with windows XP
Cons: midi/game port separate, will block another card slot, utilities may be troublesome
The Bottom Line: Sounds very nice, full 5.1 support, center channel crisp and clear, avoid the provided software--something is troublesome in windows XP.
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| suemccartin's Full Review: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer Sound Car... |
I bought this card mostly out of curiosity. I had heard a lot of good things about the old Audigy sound cards and wanted to try one for myself. As has happened a lot in the past, Creative bought the company and discontinued making their products; thus integrating the bought tech into their own products. The other feature that attracted me to this card is the built in firewire port. For those of us running out of slots in our systems the idea of having two cards in one is quite attractive.
Installation:
Before cracking the case be sure you uninstall "all" utilities, software, and drivers for your old sound card. If you've got a registry cleaner run it to be sure you've got everything off the system and any registry messes somewhat resolved.
Open the case, look for your old sound card and remove it from the system. If your old sound card is built into your motherboard, there is probably a jumper on the board that must be reset to disable the onboard sound. If you don't have a jumper, the switch is probably in your bios setup; on most systems the bios settings are accessed by hitting DEL at bootup right after the memory posts (see your book for how to access your bios settings).
The Audigy is a pci sound card, most newer systems don't even have the long black ISA slots anymore so you should be able to easily spot the usually white colored slots in your system designed for pci cards. Avoid installing your new sound card in the slot immediately next to an AGP video card, this is because the agp slot and the pci slot next to it always try to share system resources and this can cause problems, so avoid installing this card in pci1 (next to the agp video card). You can identify a AGP video card by examining the slot your video card is plugged into, it will generally be brown and shaped a lot differently from the lighter colored pci slots next to it.
The Audigy really requires two slots if you want to install the midi/game port. I think that Creative should have used a little more common sense here, why does it have to block another slot? Can't they come up with a plastic piece that would fit in a 3 and half inch bay on the front of the system or somesuch? Most people with newer systems don't use the game port anyway, usb joysticks have become far more popular than the older ones that use the game port and are a easier installation. So really you don't need that extra piece unless you want to use the midi port for your keyboard or other music device. The midi port doesn't fit on the card because the firewire port is in the spot that the midi port used to occupy.
Install the card and screw it down. Hookup your speakers.
Connections:
Standard fare here. I always like the fact that Creative provides a auxilliary input mini plug on the rear of their cards, it makes it easier to hookup such things as tv cards and anything else that uses sound and you want to play it out over your computer speakers. Front, Rear, and center channel outputs are provided on the card and at the bottom of the card is a single firewire connector. This card like other 5.1 cards I've seen sticks to the color scheme (the connectors are colored) found on 5.1 speakers, Black, green, yellow.
Internally the card has two cdrom sound inputs a, digital input, a TAD connector (Telephone Audio Device, if you've got a modem with one of these connectors it allows playback through the speakers), and a connector for creative's proprietary Audigy drive ($149-169.00) that apparently gives you another firewire connector and a slew of other ports including midi (so again anyone that really wants to do that stuff seriously probably will buy the audigy drive and ditch that extra connector that blocks another card slot.
Compatibility:
I haven't found anything yet that doesn't work perfectly with it. Creative has been the leading manufacturer of low cost sound cards for a long time and most games seem to be most extensively tested with their products. The advent of windows simplified the sound card issue somewhat by offering a standard or two, but creative still seems to have the lions share of the low cost soundcard market for the home user.
The onboard firewire port is supposedly the latest standard. For those that don't know what firewire is, it's the latest version of hotswappable connector designed to move a lot of data very quickly over the bus connection while providing an installation as easy as USB (universal serial bus). Firewire provides transfer speeds comparable with SCSI (small computer systems interface) without all the hassles and is hot swappable (you don't have to shut the machine off to plug in another device). Firewire devices, like usb, generally must only be plugged in to install them. Windows XP apparently provides extensive built in support for firewire devices. Firewire ports are most often seen on digital still and movie cameras, it can be applied to other devices but since usb came out first and usb 2 is now out, it seems to only slowly being provided for other applications such as external hard drives. Firewire devices are also still a good bit more expensive than usb 1 or 2 devices.
I only own one firewire device and a firewire repeater/hub with 5 open ports on it. (Like usb, firewire can support a LOT of devices if you stack hub/repeaters together in the chain) The repeater needs no installation or drivers and the driver for my Lexar firewire compact flash reader comes integrated into windows xp. For anyone used to downloading their digital pictures over a usb 1 port, you have simply got to try firewire!!!!! Pictures that take over 5 minutes to download over usb 1, download in just over a minute on my firewire reader, it really is 4+ times faster!!!!
How it sounds:
I've got a Philips Acoustic Edge 5.1 soundcard which is comparable to this card. The only thing I find lacking with the philips card is the volume of sound output on the center channel (even with the volume for the center channel adjusted all the way up) I often can't hear the dialog being output on the center channel. With the Audigy I don't have this problem, the center channel sound is strong and clear once adjusted. When the drivers and audio hq first loaded, the audio hq defaults to digital output. At least with my Altec Lansing 251 speakers I had to turn this off or suffer very distorted sound. Once digital mode was shut off the sound was wonderful.
I play online games a great deal, I don't have the perfect surround sound setup but I have tried to arrange the rear speakers somewhat behind me and the fronts by my monitor and the center channel above my monitor and I think it really sounds fantastic, much better than my old Live cards ever did.
Price:
Compusa occasionaly puts this card on sale for around $79.00 which is competitive with many other sound cards that may not offer all of the functionality. I was able to pickup an "oem" version of the card at a computer show for about $62.00 + tax. Oem is usually exactly the same piece of hardware, you just don't get the fancy box and possibly the games that are often included with items such as this. The usual price I see on this card is $99.00. When you consider that most firewire interface cards by themselves are around $30.00 and most decent sound cards are in the $50.00 range, the price of this card is really a bargain.
Software:
You get several pieces of software even with the oem card. I for one have never had a lot of luck with Creative's utilities on any of their cards that I've owned. This batch of software was no exception. I'm not sure which utility caused the issue, but something made my cpu usage shoot up to 100% and stay there. I've got a AMD 1700+ in my main system, nothing should be able to use that much horsepower continuously unless it's fighting with something else already on the machine. Fortunately I was able to boot into XP's version of safe mode and deinstall all the software the creative installer helpfully loaded up for me. So if you want my advice, use the card and the driver and the Audio HQ, ditch the rest of the stuff it wants to load up, something is troublesome in Windows XP.
The bottom line is that this card sounds very nice. As long as you avoid the utilities packaged with it you should have no problems installing it and using it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 62.00
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Epinions.com ID:
suemccartin
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Location: Florida, USA
Reviews written: 289
Trusted by: 36 members
About Me:
Been building computers for 10+ years. I work to support my computer habit.
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