The new king of Audio! (Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX)

Name: mark_scott

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Product:	Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX
Date:	02/12/01 (1767 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: external outputs, SB1394, ASIO music drivers

Disadvantages: expensive, complex install

Having been bitten by the well known incompatibilities between the SB Live family of cards and Athlon motherboards, I was wary of buying the Audigy platinum. I had no reason to be worried however as it was literally a dream come true.

Installing this card is not easy by any means, there are a lot of components to think about: the main card, a smaller daughter card, an external breakout box and a monolithic cable. It will take you a good half hour at least to set it all up.

The monolithic cable houses the signals for MIDI, SPDIF and Optical digital out as well as RCA and Mike. It also deals with firewire. thats right, the Audigy has firewire built in. however Apple has a vulcan death grip on the term Firewire so creative calls it SB1394 (1394 is the IEEE standard number).

Not a lot of use for this connector I hear people say but if you have a digital camcorder it is easy to connect and with Creative about to release some nice new external peripherals next year with the SB1394 interface as standard, you will realise what a godsend it is.

Once you get the hardware installed, you have 4 CDs of software to think about. the driver CD contains drivers for all OSes from 98se up to XP however you will need to download the XP update to get it to work flawlessly. Notice I said 98se. I say that because anything less than 98se will render the SB1394 useless.

Once all the drivers are in and the support applications loaded, you will have one of the nicest sounding PCs around. I said at the beginning about the incompatibilities between Creative and Via chipsets, this has now been fixed and the card does not stutter even under high disk loading. this alone is worth buying the Audigy for.

Included in the package is a remote control which is used for controling media software and volume amongst other things.

The Platinum ex is mainly for serious musicians with its slew of external connectors but all flavo
urs of the Audigy support 24/96 recording and ASIO - a sound driver system for Cubase VST. this allows direct access to the soundcard, bypassing DirectX and giving you extremely low latency - the time between doing something and hearing it.

Overall I am very pleased with my purchase, I know that the EX is very expensive and that one of the lesser Audigy may well do you but if your a musician who needs front access to connectors then this is the one for you!

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