A Closer Look

If you've seen the original Audigy you'll be fairly familiar with the look of the Audigy2. Creative have stayed with the chocolate brown PCB and gold plated connectors which still gives that air of class so often absent from cards with bright green PCBs, vivid plastic jacks and wild assortment of coloured capacitors. I know it's all psychological and has absolutely nothing to do with the price of beans but we all like a piece of hardware that looks the business don't we? particularly when we're feeling a little smug about believing we own the best around.

Inside the box keeping the card company is not only a very well thought out games bundle, it's also a real life showcase for the power of Creative's EAX ADVANCED HD technology. First off you have a full retail version of the excellent Hitman 2 from EIDOS. This much anticipated follow up to Hitman features full EAX ADVANCED HD support as does Soldier of FortuneII Double Helix which you'll also find in there. The other three CDs consist of the expected installation CD, a DVD-Audio sampler that lets you jump right in and hear the spectacular benefits of 96KHz, six channel, 24bit DVD-Audio and the finally a nice if graphically ordinary demo that shows off some of the Audigy2's capabilities.

As per the Audigy1 the MIDI/Game port is supplied on a separate bracket that you can choose to fit or forget at your whim. Why didn't they put it on the card like so many other manufacturers do?...............

.........Simple really, there just isn't room. The Audigy2 features seven connectors already which are (from top to bottom when viewed left)

O Digital Out
O Line In
O Mic In
O Line Out 1
O Line Out 2
O Line Out 3
0 IEEE1394 (Firewire)

In the documentation the Firewire port is actually referred to as an SB1394 rather than an IEEE1394 port and I don't know if Creative have tweaked or altered anything in order to earn the right to do this but in testing with my MiniDV video camera it worked as normal so I'm not worried (famous last words).

The gold plating is a nice touch that in theory makes for a better connection and purer transmission of data but the downside is that it's hard to identify which socket is which round the murky rear of an under-desk case without having the manual handy.

The internal connectors remain as they were for the Audigy with TAD, CD In, Aux In, Firewire and SPDIF from your CD/DVD player.

DACs and Codecs

Perhaps one of the most critical improvements comes from the DACs that Creative have opted for. The Crystal CS4382 is a high quality and a relatively pricey unit that offers a very impressive performance.

• 24-bit conversion
  
• Up to 192 kHz sample rates
  
• 114 dB dynamic range
  
• -100 dB THD+N
  
• Supports PCM and DSD data formats
  
• Selectable digital filters
  
• Volume control with soft ramp
  
• 1 dB step size
  
• Zero crossing click-free transitions
  
• Dedicated DSD inputs
  
• Low clock jitter sensitivity
  
• Simultaneous support for two synchronous sample rates for DVD audio
  
• µC or standalone operation
  

Also onboard is the SigmaTel Stac9721 AC'97 Codec which is accessed internally by the card for specific analogue functions..

The Features Explained

Now we've taken a look at the hardware let's examine the Audigy2's key features and try to decode what they really mean to you and me.

EAX ADVANCED HD™ is primarily all about games and is the new generation of EAX. EAX ADVANCED HD™ essentially adds sophisticated effects to otherwise flat and unrealistic sounds to mirror their real life properties.

Multi-Environment : Audigy2 does support up to four simultaneous environments in real time.

Environment Morphing : One of the problems with changing from one environment to another has always been that the change tends to happen a little too suddenly. From an outdoor scene with normal crisp sound, you walk into a cave and the echo appears all at once the second you cross the boundry from outdoors to indoors. Environment Morphing works like image morphing does, slowly blending the two environments together and making the change smoother and more natural.

Environment Panning : This rather misleadingly named feature allows for you to hear the effects from approaching environment changes. As you know if you've ever driven into a tunnel, the sound of the engine begins to change some time before you actually enter the tunnel itself. Although morphing smooths out the transition, Environment panning allows the change in environment to be predicted and mapped from much further away than morphing would allow.

Environment Reflections : In the Goldmine demo they use a bird squawking as it flies around the a canyon. Although the general environment setting in the scene doesn't allow for the bird sound to be modified in any way, using environment reflections allows you to hear the squawks echo back from the canyon walls.

Environment Filtering : High pass filters are used to filter for accurate simulation of environmental characteristics.

All these features are of course in addition to the obstruction, occlusion and other effects already available with EAX.

The less games related features include:

Audio Clean-Up : Provides real time audio cleanup on the fly rather than using the old method of record first and cleanup later. EAX ADVANCED HD™ actually offers real time scrubbing of mic inputs and line in. It also tidies up some of the artifacts found in low bitrate MP3s and and havily compressed audio removing the annoying pops and clicks in the process. Finally there's manually selectable levels of low-band or high-band noise removal.

Creative Multi-Speaker Surround 3D (CMSS 3D) : CMSS 3D technology uses some very clever and extremely powerful algorithms to upmix a conventional two channel stereo source such as your beloved MP3s or CD audio into genuine 6.1. The drivers allow you to specify two levels of CMSS 3D which differ in that CMSS 2 offer some added ambient effects which can sound really impressive or spoil your listening depending on your sound source. I found some Audio CDs and MP3s sounded great with CMSS enabled while others didn't. Nicam stereo though our Prolink PixelView PlayTV HD TV card benefited greatly from enabling CMSS 2.

Smart Volume Management : This simply balances the range of high and low volume segments within an audio source. This of course leads to a false effect where a tune that would normally feature quiet and loud segments would have the quiet segments amplified and the loud segments toned down but it can be useful in certain circumstances, particularly where a collection of songs differ a lot in their recorded volume levels.

Time Scaling : being able to change the speed at which a sound source plays is nothing new but no doubt you've witnessed the way the pitch lowers when you slow a source down and raises when you speed it up. The Smurfs would never have lived without it. But what the Audigy 2's time scaling does is it allows you to increase or decrease playback speed without altering the pitch! It doesn't sound quite as natural as the original sound but it's still very clever and a boon far all the would-be DJs out there when it comes to creating that killer mega-mix.

Just like EAX ADVANCED HD™ is the evolution of EAX so Dolby Digital Surround EX is the natural evolution of Dolby Digital. EX adds an additional surround channel to the two that exist in regular Dolby Digital which is positioned behind the listener and reproduced through either a single or preferably a pair of additional speakers.

This is big news for the Audigy2 though in reality the standards required for THX certification in PC multimedia products is fairly vague and is nowhere near as stringent as it is for fully fledged home cinema equipment. In its simplest terms THX certification can be thought of as a kind of quality assurance mark and you can be reasonably certain that a product that bares the logo isn't going to be a turkey. The Audigy2 is the first sound card to pick up THX certification and this is a real trophy for Creative.

The Audigy2 offers full 24-bit/96kHz recording which means more faithful and more detailed recordings from a variety of sources. The original Audigy you may remember could output 24-bits but not record. Like the original Audigy it also features the ASIO standard. ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output) was developed by Steinberg and is a cross-platform, multi-channel audio transfer standard that is becoming widely adopted by a range of audio sequencing software vendors. It also allows software to directly access ASIO compatible hardware which bypasses the operating system's audio handling and can thus reduce latency to around 2 milliseconds and allows multi-channel recording at 16-bit/48kHz.

This would be great but for the fact that any sound card that shares a box with a power supply and other noise creating components is not going to come close to true 24bit, at least not until they find some way to totally isolate the DAC/ADC.

Let's step once more into the murky world of competing standards. DVD-Audio is a massive step up in quality from humble CD Audio and I don't use the term massive lightly. DVD-Audio takes advantage of the superior storage capabilities of DVD to offer high fidelity stereo or more impressively multi-channel surround sound.

DVD-Audio disks are expensive so it was great that Creative saw fit to include a 17 track sampler that lets you witness the benefits of the new format. Unfortunately DVD-Audio isn't the only format that's around right now and Sony are busy pushing their proprietary SACD format. If SACD were to become the industry standard, and with Sony's muscle that's not impossible, you may find the Audigy2's DVD-Audio capabilities obsolete pretty quickly. I don't personally believe this will happen, then again I bet on Betamax!

The biggest gripe with DVD-Audio at the moment is the fact that you can only output a multi-channel stream in analogue . Record companies are responsible for this crippling move simply because they couldn't manage to agree on a suitably secure encryption standard to ease their piracy concerns.

Very much the heart and soul of the Audigy2's new features is what they've christened MediaSource. MediaSource is actually an umbrella name that Creative use to cover the whole range of their software from the players to the driver function panels. It also encompasses the new organiser which offers far too many ways to log your music collection along with a smart search function to find it again when you realise your filing system wasn't as foolproof as you thought.

Before we move on to the performance section I should mention one major disappointment with regards the Audigy2's effects engine. There seems little point boasting about a 24-bit/96kHz sound path when your effects engine actually down-samples this to 16 bits/48 kHz in order to apply an effect and alas this is precisely what the Audigy2 does. Of course this can be resampled back to 24-bit/96KHz again but the damage has already been done. In games this is hardly likely to be an issue but for music it's going to be a killer and is likely to take the Audigy2 off the home recording studio buff's shopping list.

Introduction

Installation/Drivers