Amazing sound, slightly dodgy drivers (Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX)

Name: seanblee

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX
Date:	21/06/02 (3724 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing sound quality, Reasonable price, Good hardware quality

Disadvantages: Drivers poor in some respects, Slightly odd driver installation procedure required

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Audigy is Creative's current sound Card, and it really sets the standard when it comes to sound quality. The signal-to-noise ratio of the card is 96dB, which is incredible in itself, and it's improved further by the inclusion of a 24-bit DAC on the output side of things.

The card supports full Dolby Digital (AC3) 5.1 Surround Sound, and can output, via digital S/PDIF, DTS sound for an external decoder. On the technical hardware side, the card is a standard bus-mastering PCI card. It's PCI2.1 and ACPI compliant.

Furthermore, the card supports a brand-new EAX standard, EAX Advanced HD. Below is some of the tech blurb from Creative's website.

EAX ADVANCED HD Game Audio Library: New Multi-Environment? technology renders up to 4 simultaneous audio environments in real time. Environment Panning? makes spatializing and localizing environments in 3D possible. Environment Reflections? offers localization of early reflections and echoes. Environment Filtering? accurately simulates the propagation of sound in both open and closed environments. Finally, Environment Morphing? allows for seamless transition from one environment to the next.

EAX ADVANCED HD Music Technologies: Audio Clean-Up enables the removal of unwanted noise in a digital audio file. DREAM? creates an enhanced, "disco-like" surround sound for any stereo music. Time Scaling speeds up and slows down music with no distortion or change in pitch. Music playback is further enhanced with the specially developed EAX ADVANCED HD music effects, making Sound Blaster Audigy the ultimate PC-based hi-fi system.

As you can tell, EAX3 really is something special.

Finally, the card also supports SB1394, a.k.a. FireWire. This can be used to connect didigtal devices to the compuer for input and output, or to network two computers at very high speed (400Mbps).


SOFTWARE
BUNDLE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The card ships with several pieces of software; you get Creative PlayCenter 3, for all your music playing needs (it can also transfer music to a Creative portable music device); Creative Surround Mixer, which controls speaker configuration, EAX presets and volume controls; Goldmine Demo, which demonstrates the EAX3 technology; Oozic Player (formerly LAVA), which provides some pretty smart visualisations for MP3s; Firenet, for SB1394 networking on non-WinXP machines; and one full game (either Deus Ex or Giants: Citizen Kabuto).

Furthermore, the Platinum EX comes with Creative RemoteCenter, Vienna SoundFont Studio 2.3, iM Tuner, ACID DJ 2.0- Sonic Foundry, Beatnik's Mixman Studio Remixer, Cubasis VST - Creative Edition, Fruityloops - Creative Edition, MixMeister - MixMeister Technologies, Recycle Lite - Steinberg, Ulead VideoStudio 4.0 SE Basic and WaveLab-Lite - Steinberg. All in all, an extremely impressive software bundle!


INSTALLATION ADVICE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Installing the card physically is as easy as any other; the joystick bracket can be a bit of a pain to fit, but it's no biggy.
It's important when installing a sound card, especially one such as an Audigy, to ensure it's put in a PCI slot which doesn't share its IRQ. On many motherboards this is slot 3 or 4. If you don't put it in a slot with an unshared IRQ, you'll probably experience things like the squeal of death and various crackling problems; it's just simpler to try to stick to an unshared
slot where possible. Now the card's in, hit the power!

Software installation can be problematic I'm told; I've never experienced any trouble with it, but I was careful to follow instructions to the letter.
Under Windows XP with the original retail CD, you have to cancel the 'Found hardware' wizard and run the Creative setup program from the CD. Install just the drivers (i
t installs Windows 2000 drivers), reboot, install the Windows XP update from the Web, reboot, then install any of the software
that you want. Simple! Why they couldn't make drivers that install the usual way with 'Found hardware' I do not know, but never mind.


POTENTIAL PROBLEMS WITH THE CARD
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Once it's up and running it's great. There are a few minor issues which probably can (and will) be corrected in the next driver release, which is due who-knows-when. These include things like the volume intermittently being set to 100% on boot, the XP Voice Test not working ('Your sound
hardware doesn't appear to be able to play back sounds'!) and issues with bluescreen crashes related to CTOSS2K.sys, but other than that, they're not too bad. Other issues reported include things like EAX dropouts, the card randomly resetting itself to 2-speaker output mode, various SoundFont issues plus probably some I've forgotten about.
Once the card is up and running, you'll be delighted with the sound quality; I know I was!

The EAX3 effects are extremely impressive, and are well-demonstrated in the EAX Goldmine demo that comes with the card. Overall, I think I'd recommend this card, as long as you're happy to spend a little time to get it perfect.
If you want a card that's guaranteed to work as soon as you plug it in, this one may not be for you.

Summary: