| Product: |
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX |
| Date: |
04/01/02 (431 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Crisp,clear sound, No more crackles or pops, great software bundle
Disadvantages: Quite pricy?, Need 5.1 speakers to make most of it!
Having owned a series of Soundblaster cards (SB 16, 512, Live! 5.1) I had watched Creative fall behind other sound card manufacturers like Hercules and Aureal.
Creative were still using the ageing EMU101K processor as the basis for even their newer cards like the Live! 5.1 which offered Dolby 5.1 connectivity for PC owners with suitable 5.1 speakers systems (5 satelites and 1 sub woofer).
Sound cards have taken a back seat to graphics card for a long time. Unless you are a professional musician, or serious 3D game player, it can be difficult to justify spending serious cash on a 5.1 or even just a 4 speaker sound system. Many people are still happy with a stereo speaker system running off an old Soundblaster card.
As PC processing power has drastically increased in the last year, with processors running at 2ghz and the new "industry standard" Geforce graphics cards offering Hardware transform and lighting, game developers can finally dedicate system resources to good quality 3d sound. All the new systems from people like Time, Tiny & Dell have powerful processors, bags of memory and most have 4 or 5.1 speaker systems as standard. Creative DTT2200 5.1 analog speaker set is only £80, so proper 3D sound is becoming more affordable. Good quality 3D sound has the potential to provide maybe 30% of the immersion when playing a 3D game, which is why developers, card manufacturers and the game playing public are keen to embrace the newer 5.1 systems.
I had problems with my Soundblaster Live! 5.1 card, numerous problems and incompatability issues with my Athlon based system. Sometimes this would be little pops and crackles during games, other times it was responsible for system crashes, windows errors and so on. Then one channel "blew", the card was replaced under warranty. 6 months later, this happened again. I'd had enough and took the card back to the retailer. After some discussion, I paid an extra £30 and go
t the new Audigy Player card, also from Creative.
The Audigy card uses a processor simply called "Audigy", which is brand new and much more powerful than the old EMU101K processor. The new processor offers much higher quality sound, increased bit depth and processing power. It also has an enhanced set of EAX extensions, which are used to create various 3D soundfields using complex algorhythms - for example "Theatre", "Underwater" and "Rock Concert". These can be used by game and software developers to give greater immersion when playing 3D games, for example.
The Augidy card is much higher quality than the old Live! 5.1. It uses plated metal connectors, a more sturdy motherboard and seems to have a cleaner component layout, and the all important Audigy processor. The connectors are quite confusing, as the old Soundblaster card connectors used a colour code to indicate different channels - for example Black, lime green and yellow. The Audigy card doesn't use this layout, the channels are indicated by tiny inscriptions next to each connector - the literature also doesn't mention which old soundblaster "colour" matches which of the new connectors. It's a bit trial and error, but I worked it out eventually by reading the manual for my Creative DTT2200 5.1 speakers and comparing it to the new Audigy manual.
Software is also better this time around. I wasn't a fan of the Live! 5.1 player software, it was a bloated installation (20mb), looked naff and was quite tempramental: refusing to recognise a new compact disc unless you shut it down and restarted it , refusing to shut down, stalling, etc. It was a real pain, and took ages to install.
It's weird how someone like Nvidia can provide a set of complex 3D graphics drivers in just 3mb of code, yet a sound card manufacturer needs 20mb of code to provide a cd player, 3d sound field and cd ripper (I would argue that the
graphics drivers are way more complex)?
The new Audigy player software is neat, simple and seems much more stable. Maybe they've finally ironed out the bugs that plagued the 5.1 cards. You also get a wider choice of player "skins" for the cd player, and there are some small changes to the cd ripping software. Something that put a huge smile on my face was the inclusion of Planet Moon's brilliant "Giants: Citizen Kabuto" game as part of the bundle. This is a great game, very original and fun, and makes great use of EAX and graphics card that support H T&L (hardware transform and lighting) like the Geforce cards.
As well as the usual 5.1 connectors, line-in and mic-in sockets, Creative include a 1394 Firewire port on the card. This is great for connecting digital video gamers and other digital equipment that needs a high-speed transfer rate. But this doesn't leave room for a joystick socket, so they've included a small plate housing the joystick socket, that is attached like any PCI card to the back of your PC's case. A small ribbon connector links this to the sound card. This seems a bit odd, until you realise that all game controllers (such as Microsoft Sidewinder joysticks) now use USB sockets, which means you don't have to use the joystick socket / plate unless you have an old gamepad that doesn't support USB.
The proof of a soundcard is in the listening, and the Audigy delights. It sounds crisper, clearer and has more "control" over the 5.1 speakers I used.
My old Live! 5.1 card sounded okay, but seemed a bit underpowered with 5.1 speakers, the Audigy's more powerful processor seems to do the business and gives a great quality of sound for audio compact discs and especially for DVD videos. The more powerful processor will take more load off the PC's CPU, which must be a good thing!
Playing games sound sharper too, although it may be some time until new
games hit the market that support the new EAX extensions.
Overall, it's still too early to comment on long-term reliability, but the Audigy so far has worked flawlessly, and offers crisper, sharper sound. The cracking and popping of the old card has gone, no more funnny noises during 3d games thank you!
The new EAX set is interesting, the player and ripping software is better quality and the bundled software makes this £80 card worth every penny.
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Ophelia - 04/01/02 Very informative - although it was pretty much all Greek to me! |
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