Audigy2 Great Sound or not?

[Jose]

@mikeymike
thx but nevermind, the one I got was the Audigy2.

[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.

[Waccoon]

I can only comment on the Audigy, not the Audigy 2.  My impression is that the card is OK.  Then again, I only use it for games, and don't own anything other than a pair of headphones.  I demand audio quality, not features, and a strict headphone user like me can be pretty hard to please in a world dominated by satellite speakers and subwoofers.  ;-)

Cons:
The drivers need some work.  For the longest time there was a volume bug that blared the speakers randomly on startup.  It took them, like, two years to fix that.  Also, the equalizer settings are WAY too primitive.  Just a bass and treble, instead of a full spectrum equalizer.  Very bad, considering I use headphones, and the default EQ setting is very tinny and optimized for external speakers.  Right now, my Audigy performs like crap in my nForce2 board, with plenty of pops with high-end 3D games under Win2K.  In WinXP, audio quality is untolerable, which forced me to use my nForce2 built-in audio until I downgraded back to Win2K.  NASCAR Racing 2003, my favorite high-end game, has loads of 3D accelerated audio problems with the card.  These problems are apparent in other games, but NASCAR Racing 2003 is a particularly good test.  Also, the soldering around the jacks was very weak on my board, so I had to re-solder the connections to prevent crackling.  My SB Live! card had many of the same issues, except the build quality was excellent.

Pros:
Powerful and clear line output.  Impressivly low CPU utilization.  The EQ is limited in functionality, but still mixes pretty well, nonetheless.  The recording input is better than any other card I've owned.  The impressive build of components delivers drasticly sharper sound quality than the DACs on built-in motherboard audio.  The MIDI instruments are OK...  Nothing special in terms of quality, but very universal and effective with loads of different music files.  Overall, I think it's better than the nForce2 audio in terms of mix quality and options, and that says a lot.  I'm upgrading my nVidia nForce2 board to an Intel 865PE in a few days.  Hopefully my Audigy will perform better in that system.

[mikeymike]

@ Jose

The reason why I mentioned it is because it made me think twice before buying from a company which is willing to mislead customers over product specs.

[Gaidheal]

I have to be honest and say that I used to think the sun shone from Creative's rear-end, as far as audio.  Now I wouldn't touch one, at the prices they go for anyway.  And I have found the nForce2 (Soundstorm) stuff to be more than adequate for gaming and general use.

SBLive!  was fine until XP at which point they cynically decided not to properly support it, in an effort to make people get Audigy.  I opted out at this point, since my on-board audio was a 5.1 surround setup, etc, etc and perfectly capable of handling basic gaming tasks / general use.  It had a few annoying quirks but was actually far more stable and ultimately performed better than the Live! 5.1 I had...  with SoundStorm I shall now not be bothering to get a standalone card until such time as a I seriously want to start with music recording/editing again.

[Blomberg]

mikeymike wrote:
The reason why I mentioned it is because it made me think twice before buying from a company which is willing to mislead customers over product specs.

Exactly! I wouldn't touch Creative's cards with a ten foot pole, for that reason alone, unless it was for a strict general use/gaming rig. I simply don't trust them enough to rely on their products for an audio workstation, even for a bedroom composer like myself.
Once i get my act together and go out and get that sound card i need (using the onboard VIA 686 atm, surprisingly good quality, on my board, anyways) it will probably be an M-Audio or Esi-Pro (Egosys) low-end thing, cards that are generally regarded as 'kosher' 24/96(192). Haven't tried the Esi-Pro yet, but even the cheapest M-Audio card, The Audiophile, blew me away when I demo'ed it, definitely recommended.

[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

[Mad-Matt]

the Audigy2 is still the best of the best for home use, sure i wouldnt want to run a sound studio off the thing, but id buy a pro sound card if i wanted studio quality and it would cost a pretty penny too.

Creative still make the highest quality/feature rich cards and not much else in its price range stands in its way.

As for games, theres no other choice, EAX3 adds so much to the games atmosphere, that youd never want to use a lesser card.

sure creative have issues with the drivers for some users, but ive used it in nearly all chipsets going without a single issue as with other creative cards, i guess the issue is more the user then the software heh ..

[legion]

Missing is the spec's mentioned is that the Audigy2 has a Signal to Noise ratio of 106, which is higher than the output of most CD players.  So there is very little difference between them spec-wise.

I mention this because when you are trying to differenciate between signals that clean (both are excellent), it almost becomes a mute point.  My advice is to see if you demo both of them on the set of speakers you plan to buy (difficult, I know).

Here is the reason:  My brother and my own car audio systems are almost identical.  Both have Alpine component speakers (and subwoofer) and Alpine amplifiers.  The only difference is the head units.  I paid about $300 for my Clarion Pro-audio CD deck, and he has an Eclipse.

Spec-wise, his deck should blow mine away, but thats not the case.  The DAC's on the Clarion are warmer, even though the Signal-to-Noise is higher on the Eclipse deck.  He spent $450 on his head unit.  The difference is clear once you sit in the cars and play identical CD's for reference (my personal favorite CD to reference with is Juno Reactor's "Bible of Dreams").     :-D

So what I'm saying is simply to listen to both, if you can.

[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.

[AmiGR]

Hehe, I got myself a Jackson JS-30 Dinky. A very good
guitar for it's price. I also got a V-Amp 2 and I
highly recommend it if you want to record anything.
And if you might record, do yourself a favour and get
a Terratec card... I tried both the Audigy2 and the
6fire... No competition :-)

[AmiGR]

Do not ever trust Creative's s/n specifications...
They're hardly ever real...

About CD players, if you want high quality DACs,
get an external unit. I'm about to buy one
(the one I was looking at must have been an audio
fidelty unit). If you get a very good DAC and a
player with average built in dacs you get a unit
that would have worth double the money .