Audigy2 Great Sound or not?

[Wain]

Many regard Terratec cards better than Creative's especially when you don't need a sound card just for games or Home Cinema. As far as I am concerned M-Audio cards are even better.

I agree, M-Audio spends most of their time catering to professional markets as opposed to the average home user, and is working their way down from very high end audio interfaces to the consumer end, which typically means that they'll be doing it better than most competition.  

Creative is still attempting to work their way up to get some of the home-studio market, and in this particular market, up is a much more dfficult direction to travel than down.

[Wain]

...the cheapest M-Audio card, The Audiophile, blew me away when I demo'ed it, definitely recommended.

Don't forget if you're talking about the Audiophile 2496 that it is a professional card and doesn't have a wave table in it, so if you ever need to play MIDI audio (some games use it, although not many) , you'll need some kind of MIDI keyboard, or a seperate card for the GM set.

If you're just looking for a general sound card, but you want really good quality, you should try their 'revolution' line

[Wain]

EDIT - I delete this because my irritation wasn't worth the headache I would get reading the responses to it.

[Wain]

Technically speaking, the Revolution from M-Audio is a superior card to the Audigy 2.  It's only superior by several minor levels that any normal human being (read: NON-Audio Engineer) would never notice.  It also supports Dolby 7.1, and full 192khz playback on all channels even in surround mode unlike the Audigy (once again, not like you'd notice)

However, on top of it having slightly higher specs than the Audigy, it also retails for $30 less because it doesn't have unnecessary things formost consumers like firewire and S/PDIF outputs on it.

Also, there are several well documented cases of incompatibilities with Creatives drives under specific MB chipsets and Windows Mr Smug and obnoxious.


More importantly, Creative has developed a nasty habit of not making new drivers available for their hardware as soon as they have a new card line available.  It was quite difficult to find drivers for the Live! series cards on their website for several months when Audigy came out because they felt that everyone should buy their new product.

Found a nice pretty link giving an example of Creative driver problems...

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=26

BTW, just to make a quick point, I think the Audigy 2 is an excellent card.  Creative makes lousy drivers however, and the company has a habit of trying to rip off it's consumers as much as it can get away with IMHO.