Because of lack of a special hardware unit the Live! Although the 3D sound wasn't impressing through 2 speakers and headphones with the EAX 1. Besides, any non-EAX game or any reproduced sound could be "refrashed" with reverb high-quality effects. Old games sounded much better. Well, the Live! Now Creative is releasing all possible variations of the Live! The models of the cards are CT, CT Drives installed into a 5" bay.
The rear panel features a Digital Out. Because it has a stereo mini-jack connector, and, therefore, it is a dual-channel one three-pin. The card also has a jumper which determines whether to transfer through the central pin a signal only for front speakers or for front and rear ones.
Well, you can see that the Live! The second generation for example, SB Live! The quality of the Creative speakers corresponds to their price. Maybe it is not the best choice for a home theater, but you will definitely enjoy watching DVD movies and playing games. Unlike a necessity in an OpenGL accelerator, Quake3 will work even with a cheap sound card since the sound was originally sampled at 11 kHz. In the review Creative SB Live! Platinum 5.
The chips had 4! The Platinum 5. The quality of a digital sound didn't improve much in the Live! But there are other very pleasant things such as 5. How the decoding is implemented on a software, hardware or soft hardware level is not necessary for a user to know.
And it doesn't necessary to buy a new card. By the way, the Live! Secondly, this is a 4-pin connector! Thus, you can transfer 6 uncompressed PCM streams 16bit 48 kHz without quality losses in either operating mode movies, games or music.
You will need 6 decoded channels in movies if you want to listen to a sound track in the DTS standard in the highest quality mode when watching a DVD movie, even without a special hardware decoder WinDVD 3. You can enjoy a 6-channel digital sound in games the same way. Connection in an analog mode yields in quality to the digital one, especially in high frequencies. The problem of reproduction of Audigy announcement The Live! Ware2, Live! Ware3 for Live! The developers promise 4 times higher computational power as compared with the EMU10K1 which it is compatible with and whose features its inherits.
There it is possible to overlay twice more effects for music; besides, the set of effects is extended. The musicians now can load SoundFont2. There is also an ASIO 2. Besides, sound can be reproduced in the 24bit 96kHz format through integrated DACs. On August 20 Creative announces the next generation of Sound Blaster Audigy cards based on the Audigy audio processor. And today we are going to study a sample of the Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX which we recently received.
Now the design of the box is just a real piece of art! Everything that I said about the Platinum eX concerns the characteristics of all Audigy sound cards. You should only allow for accessories of different models. The card is severely redesigned. The AC'97 specification of even the latest version 2. The Audigy also uses the Philips converters. The stereo AC'codec Creative CT is used for mixing of all analog signals from card's internal connectors. A high-quality signal from an expensive DAC can be easily damaged by a couple of discrete elements or by noise in power.
On the other hand, products with similar characteristics can sound completely different. That is why the characteristics for 48 kHz and 96 kHz are equal, and it is still the home-sector product. Connection Connection of the 5. There are two ways to do it. It is a complicated question A large connector with three rows of pins is meant for connection of an external module.
The second SB port is meant for connection of a cable which also goes to an external module. Card's internal connectors:. After installation of the supplied drivers the system acquired:.
At last, the SB16 emulation doesn't take resources because it is absent by default! Utilities The Audigy has now more utilities and they are more convenient:. The SF2. X sample bank size is almost unlimited now:. Creative states that the Audigy Platinum eX is meant for boundless musical creativity. The basic card's features to provide it: convenience of operation with an external module; 24bit 96kHz DACs; support of the ASIO with its 2ms delay min.
Everything apart from the first item also concerns other cards of the series. Let's discuss each point separately.
Whether it is convenient to use an external module as compared with a unit which installs into a 5" bay is for you to decide. At least, the external unit looks stylish and headphones with a volume control are necessary for studio work. The Cubase v 5. It is possible that for recording you will have to set 10 ms. But it is not terrible comparing to lack of But the separate and comprehensibly controlled multiclient support is lacking. For the digital-out of the Audigy there are Thus, the deferred editing is possible.
Lyrical digression. I consider that a professional can make an excellent composition with any equipment he has. In the Live! By the way, the Audigy comes with a E-mu's utility which implements such function of high-quality conversion from 48 into My composition August , 3.
I know a lot of musicians which use the Live!. I can state that the Live! My computers are now equipped with 2 professional sound cards which are much more expensive than the Live! But no one format or equipment will bring you inspiration.
In I programmed parts of instruments in the binary format in the debugger-disassembler for my own synthesizer which worked with a 1-bit speaker and I made no complains. Albums of performers of the middle of the century recorded on the old-fashioned equipment please a lot of listeners even today. That is why I refuse to accept complains of many users about imperfect equipment.
Frequency response from 20 Hz to 20 kHz , dB: But the characteristics have become much better, especially in the The parameters of the rear-out of all Creative cards in both modes prove that they can be used in inexpensive home studios.
The THD equaling 0. But considering that the THD spectrogram has almost nothing after the second harmonic as you know, the third one and those going after it are the most unpleasant the sound created by the card is quite good. It should be noted that, unlike in the Game Theater XP from Hercules, a signal proceeds to the external Audigy Drive unit and back only in a digital mode.
And it is very good! It allows avoiding direct electrical contact with circuits of external devices. Listening Here we used two acoustic systems each being a leader in its class of multimedia 5.
To estimate the difference between the Audigy and the Live! Then we connected them in an analog mode to the 2. By exchanging inputs on the front panel of the amplifying unit we could change a signal source immediately. The rear outputs of both cards sounded equally good. The front ones were also equal but they yielded to the rear-outs because of noticeable distortions.
So, for listening to music through analog-outs in a stereo mode on the SB Live! For listening in a digital mode the recommendations are the same. You can take the signal from a red RCA connector if you connect a "stereo minijack - 2 RCA connectors" cable to the digital-out of the Live! The digital-out in the Audigy drivers can work in 3 modes: It means that there are freely available acoustic sets which are fully compatible with new cards in all modes I mean DTT sets.
Everything worked good, including the EAX effects. In the Win2K nothing hung. The sound was excellent. Bechmarks with FPS and comparison of quality of Audigy vs. Despite the ground loop problem I mentioned earlier, which limited its ultimate dynamic range, the ZS provided an extremely good overall sound with precise imaging, and proved to be very close to the Mia, with only a subtle thinning during The ZS is certainly the best-sounding Soundblaster soundcard to date, and anyone considering buying an Audigy should make sure that they get this model.
While the graphic equaliser is best kept 'out of circuit' for the cleanest sound, there's no denying its usefulness to those with multimedia speakers that need a little help to sound balanced, and for those with a surround setup, the new THX Console and support for 7. This is perhaps understandable given the Audigy's integral Soundfont sampler, but when most of the budget soundcards for musicians do now provide GSIF support, it's yet another limitation.
Overall, the Audigy is probably the most comprehensive soundcard you can buy for a budget surround system, as far as I know the only one you can currently use for DVD-Audio playback, and its DSP environments and Direct Sound streaming functions make it wonderful for games.
Its twin Firewire ports can also be extremely useful for those PCs don't have them. However, despite the huge leap forward provided by the ASIO drivers of the Audigy 2, many musicians have found these cards to be a source of confusion and frustration, and despite the new and improved sound quality of this latest ZS version, I see nothing that changes this situation.
The Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro provides incremental improvements over its recent predecessor, including better sound quality, but fails to remove any of its fundamental limitations for musicians.
Overview Since the Audigy 2 ZS is so similar to its predecessor I'll concentrate on the differences only: if you want to find out about its inherited features I suggest you refer to my original review of the Audigy 2 in SOS April Improvements Over Audigy 2 Dynamic range is 2dB better. Seven-channel graphic equaliser. THX Console utility to aid speaker setup. Multiple simultaneous EAX environments in games.
New slimline IR remote control handset. Audio Performance Creative provide reviewers with copious notes on how to set up Rightmark's Audio Analyser to get the best results, specifying that Line Input 3 must be used, and explaining that this has been specifically isolated to avoid ground loop problems that will 'artificially distort the RMAA results'. Staying The Same The ZS is certainly the best-sounding Soundblaster soundcard to date, and anyone considering buying an Audigy should make sure that they get this model.
Pros Slightly better audio quality. Still no way to use Still no GSIF drivers. Ground loop problems in review system. Summary The Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro provides incremental improvements over its recent predecessor, including better sound quality, but fails to remove any of its fundamental limitations for musicians.
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