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To get the very best from these speakers Creative sent over their impressive Audigy 2 ZS.

Audigy 2 ZS

Audigy 2 ZS

I was very impressed with the performance of the card and the drivers, though much better than I remember, are still very intrusive and seem to want to monopolize you PC with more apps and software than most people will ever use or need. Time for a multi-level install if you ask me Creative, I understand you want the demanding user to have everything they need available to them but some people want access to each channel and a volume, bass and treble control and not much more.

Compatibility seemed good, an historic Creative weakness, though again I didn't really have the time to get a proper feel for its long-term behavior.

High Definition Audio Quality for Playback and Recording

• 24-bit Digital-to-Analog conversion during playback with sampling rates of 8, 11.025, 16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, 48 and 96kHz in 6.1 mode and up to 192kHz in stereo mode
• 24-bit Analog-to-Digital conversion during recording in 8, 16 or 24-bit at sampling rates of 8, 11.025, 16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, 48 and 96kHz
• SPDIF output up to 24-bit at 48 or 96kHz
• ASIO™ drivers for low latency (as low as 2ms) multi-track playback and recording at 16-bit/48kHz

Advanced Audio and 3D Audio Technology

• Dolby Digital® audio decoding to 5.1 (digital or analog modes) or Dolby Digital® EX decoding to 6.1 (analog mode only) speaker channels
• Hardware acceleration of EAX® and EAX® Advanced HD™ for games
• 32-bit Professional Quality Effects Engine with support for real-time digital effects like reverb and chorus across any audio source

Wave-Table Synthesis and MIDI Features

• Creative® Hardware synthesizer (2x16 Channels) with 64-voice polyphony featuring E-MU®'s patented 8-point interpolation technology for accurate sample reproduction
• Creative® Software synthesizer - multi timbral wave-table (16 Channels)

SB1394™/FireWire® Connectivity

• IEEE® 1394 / FireWire® / i-Link® compatible interface with up to 400Mbps transfer rate

Sound Blaster® Audigy™ On-Board Connectors

• Line level out (Front / Rear / Centre / Subwoofer /Rear Centre)
• Digital Out for 5.1 support
• Line in
• Microphone in
• SB1394™/FireWire® port
• Telephone Answering Device in
• Analog / Digital CD Audio in
• 15-pin MIDI / Joystick port extension header
• Internal SB1394™/FireWire® header to Sound Blaster® Audigy™ 2 Internal Drive (Upgrade Option)
• AD_EXT extension header to the Sound Blaster® Audigy™ 2 Internal Drive (Upgrade Option)

Works with the Following Standards

• Windows® 98SE, 2000 SP2, Me and XP
• Sound Blaster® MIDI and General MIDI
• Plug and Play
• Sound Blaster® PCI
• EAX® and EAX® Advanced HD™
• Microsoft® DirectSound®, DirectSound 3D & derivatives
• PCI 2.1 compliant
• AC '97 compliant
• Dolby Digital® (5.1)
• Dolby Digital® EX (6.1)
• DVD-Audio/Meridian Lossless Packing
• ASIO™ (16-bit/48kHz)
• SoundFont 2.1
• OpenAL™
• Windows® Media™ Audio 9

Sound Blaster® Audigy™ Audio Performance

Testing:::...

Music:::...

Titles Used:
Jean Michel Jarre - Aero
Beautiful South - Blue is The Colour
Oasis - Be Here Now
Mahler's Symphony No. 4 featuring the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Pink Floyd - Dark Side of The Moon
Tchaikovsky's piano concertos 1 and 3 played by Konstantin Scherbakov

I must say that general music listening on the S750s was rather a letdown. Heavy, bass laden tracks were handled well but lighter titles with more emphasis on the mid-high registers seemed strangely crude.

There certainly seems to be a bit of a hole between the top of the midrange and where the tweeters step in, and the tweeters themselves don't seem as crisp as you get the feeling they should be. Creative have clearly sacrificed some subtlety for a helping of gaming-suited power and grunt.

Adding the cloth grilles evened out things a little but exaggerated the slightly raw top end. I do get a feeling that a little high-volume bedding in would give these speakers a more rounded sound but we just didn't have them for long enough to explore this notion. I doubt that would do anything to refine the top end though.

I'm not suggesting the quality is bad, in fact taken on balance music sounds better on the S750s than on just about any other PC based speaker system I've had the pleasure of listening too. It's just a little frustrating that an exemplary showing could have been achieved with a little more attention the the tweeters.

DVDs:::...

Titles Used:
Contact
Pirates of The Caribbean
Star Wars Trilogy Four Disc Box Set
Hellraiser

This is where the S750s excel, well, DVDs and gaming. Strangely the top end was much more acceptable when watching DVDs while vocals and bass handling was simply superb.

If your house adjoins a neighbor's warn them in advance because there's no way you'll fight off the urge to crank them up and see what they can do.

Even for a pure home theater setup the S750s would do an excellent job even in a relatively large room. Vocal min particular were natural and clear and the overall clarity and attack was amazing.

Gaming:::...

Doom 3
Far Cry
Unreal Tournament
Call of Duty
Colin McRae 5

700 watts of pure power and enough bass to bring on a coughing fit pretty much says it all. And gaming is perhaps the only test that warranted the addition of the extra two speakers because I couldn't in all honesty say that disabling the side speakers did anything to spoil my enjoyment of either my music or my DVDs.

Only now do we really need any kind of quality from speakers used for gaming. Games now rely heavily on their soundtracks and effects to set the atmosphere and mood and the quality really has moved on now that we have hardware capable of processing large quantities of sound data while still having enough power to do the games related things aswell. Saying things like "you can hear the spent shells hitting the ground" doesn't tell you much because you'd need pretty crap speakers not to hear that, plus when you're testing hardware you're listening for things like that.

Gaming, even now is about accurate positional audio, teeth rattling explosions that walk ornaments off your shelves and gunshots that sound like gunshots, not like a mousetrap going off down a well. Most reasonably accomplished speakers do well for gaming, the S750s take things a step further.

Conclusion

The 3DVelocity 'Dual Conclusions Concept' Explained: After discussing this concept with users as well as companies and vendors we work with, 3DVelocity have decided that where necessary we shall aim to introduce our 'Dual Conclusions Concept' to sum up our thoughts and impressions on the hardware we review. As the needs of the more experienced users and enthusiasts have increased, it has become more difficult to factor in all the aspects that such a user would find important, while also being fair to products that may lack these high end "bonus" capabilities but which still represent a very good buy for the more traditional and more prevalent mainstream user. The two catergories we've used are:

The Mainstream User ~ The mainstream user is likely to put price, stock performance, value for money, reliability and/or warranty terms ahead of the need for hardware that operates beyond its design specifications. The mainstream user may be a PC novice or may be an experienced user, however their needs are clearly very different to those of the enthusiast, in that they want to buy products that operate efficiently and reliably within their advertised parameters.

The Enthusiast ~ The enthusiast cares about all the things that the mainstream user cares about but is more likely to accept a weakness in one or more of these things in exchange for some measure of performance or functionality beyond its design brief. For example, a high priced motherboard may be tolerated in exchange for unusually high levels of overclocking ability or alternatively an unusually large heat sink with a very poor fixing mechanism may be considered acceptable if it offers significantly superior cooling in return.

The Mainstream User ~

Owning a set of Gigaworks S750 speakers poses two problems, finding the money to pay for them and finding the room to position them. Few people have an easy time finding a location for four satellite speakers so as you can imagine, accurately siting seven of them can be a logistic nightmare. Even if you buy classy floor stands that don't look too out of place in the middle of your floor you still have the trailing wires to content with.

I'm not convinced the benefits of 7.1 speakers are worth the cost unless you do a lot of gaming. Any decent 5.1 setup, (there's a Gigaworks 5.1 setup called the S700) will offer pretty near identical performance and differences that are hard to perceive. An overhead and under-chair speaker would be much more effective

In terms of sound cards you'll need something like the Audigy 2 ZS to get the most from these speakers which adds another £68.94 to the equation.

All that said, what it comes down to is quality and the sound that spews forth from the S750s is impressive in almost every sense of the word, but at £250+ the lack of digital in and Dolby decoding is a big minus point.

	NA

The Enthusiast ~

The enthusiast heading is a bit misleading here because it depends if you're a games enthusiast. a movie buff or a music aficionado. If you're one of the former two you'll love the S750s. At present I don't know of anything that can touch them. If however it's music that takes up your days you may find that although the S750s to a genuinely excellent job, you can buy better for less or similar money. They lack a certain refinement that's quite hard to pin down other than to say it's at the top end. I'd have suspected bell modes but it doesn't quite sound that way.

There's a definite tendency to prioritize low and mid frequencies despite the inclusion of separate tweeters and while they're not exactly honky they just don't seem very eloquent when it matters at the top.

In terms of sound cards you'll need something like the Audigy 2 ZS to get the most from these speakers which adds another £68.94 to the equation, plus with no digital in or built-in decoder the package starts to get expensive if you've home theater plans for them.

The S750s are extremely impressive speakers in many respects, I just don't believe they offer enough features or style to be worth the price tag. Sound quality however is sure to impress and sets a new standard for PC audio.

	NA