Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ?

don't waste your money on it.. it sells for around $170-220 from what I can remember.. I'm telling you, for a extra $50-100, you can get a real audio recording setup that will give you much more flexibility.. and I'm particularly speaking of the M-Audio Omni Delta 66 (breakout box with a crap load of inputs, phantom power, XLR inputs, etc etc) and the Delta 66 card.. The SB Audigy 2 doesn't have near as many outs/ins, nor does it have phantom power for mics.. And I used the original Audigy w/live drive, it was ok, but your going to be limited in what you can do with the Audigy 2, you wont have the same flexibility as what the M-Audio or any other pro card offers.

Anyhow, don't waste your money on a off the shelf Best Buy gadget that is not a true audio recording card.. go for the something that won't restrict you and have you hitting bottlenecks everywhere you turn (both in hardware/software captibility and sound quality)..

Trust me, I thought I could get away with just using the SB Audigy, but when I switched to the M-Audio, it opened up a whole new world.

Also, you need to be aware, the SB is not going to have the same latency performance as higher end cards. It's just a gaming/music playing card.

I will concur. I have seen so many posts with problems relating to the Soundblaste low budget cards that I put a kill filter in my news reader regarding any mention of that line.

Driver problems upon driver problems. They cater to the lowest common denominator which usually rises up to bite you at some point.

24 bit yes some times ! I also have a SB and it goes from 24 bit to 16 bit on its own it seems . I tried new driver etc. and never have been happy with the card . So when I have the money I will upgrade th a Yamaha or something like that .
Don't use a sound blaster unless you can't hear a differance in your music.

Apparently you didn't read all the way through the review:



Conclusion
The Audigy2 Platinum eX an a perfect choice for a gamer, but wouldn't suite an audiophile or a professional musician. We'd recommend to have a separate card for such purposes and leave the Audigy2 for game applications.

Thanks for the input.... helps alot. SB cards are all I have used so far...but hey, I'm an old drummer/guitar player just getting back into the swing of things after finally getting a life beyond the hopes of finding associates who were serious enough to get beyond the Spinal Tap phase of ego/outsider interplay.

....hmmm......M-Audio Omni Delta 66 ......hmmm........
thanks, guys!

You might take a look at the EMU 1212M. Street prices is around $200, stereo in/out (analog), S/PDIF in/out (coax or optical) ADAT In/Out (but not if you're using optical S/PDIF); has MIDI, other nice features. Add $100 and get a bundle with the "Emulator X" virtual sampler included. Very nice specs, low latency (with ASIO; WDM support is not working well yet, according to many posts). This card sounds significantly better than the Audigy line. My next DAW will use an Emu 1820M (more ins and outs than the 1212M, but same sound quality). Read the review in Sound-on-sound; search this forum for posts.

There is also a Terratec card (also stereo) which has gotten good comments; at least one webstore is selling them for around $130 (also search this forum).

Good luck,

Jim

M-Audio Delta series cards have just hugely dropped in price due to E-mu releasing new ones. Check them out, they are great solid pieces of kit.

Regards,

Neil.

Speaking from Experience:

Have previously used SB Live! with Live! Drive - sold it on as it caused loads of errors in Windows 98SE.
Bought an M-Audio Delta 1010LT. Awesome. Ok, so you don't get the sounds but the sound quality is fault-less. Zero-Latency on 96Khz, and a nice and low 3ms on 44.1kHz. That was running on the following hardware:
Abit KT7A Raid (VIA Chipset), 512MB Corsair Memory, Western Digital HD, Windows XP Pro with loads of extra software not necessarily music related, as well as a modem card. Ati Radeon 64MB VIVO AGP video card.
AMD 1.2GHz CPU.

Now running on Asus A7V8X (1st generation) - problem with PSU dammaged old board.

Just built a PC for a friend who against my advice was hell-bent on the Audigy 2. So I installed it with latest drivers. AMD Athon XP 2500+, 512MB Corsair Value RAM, Seagate HD, Windows XP Pro. Mobo based on nForce2 chipset.
I can safely say the Audigy 2 continues the fine tradition of piss-poor sound quality and unrelenting driver issues. Scream of death occurs shortly after loading up a few soundfonts. Playback is dull and lifeless and sounds almost distant. Through a proper high-end hi-fi (not some ****ty midi-system), you really need to turn up the volume as the output level is very low. Software control panel is aweful. It takes ages to find what you need. Frequenty hangs with a Roland USB MIDI keyboard plugged in. ASIO Latency (it still only supports ASIO at 48kHz!) is a disgusting 730ms using the DirectX drivers, and a fairy crap 21ms with the creative ASIO driver. Have tried other drivers and results are no better. Best performance was in Cubase SX, but still way off the mark.

A totally useless card for the professional. Don't even consider it unless you only want it for games. Buy an M-Audio card. Prices are around 50% of what I paid for mine a year or two ago.

Have also used M-Audio Audiophile 2496 on another PC, and again sound quality was awesome. Echo Layla is also good - replaced Audiophile with this rack-mount card. Mixer is not as good as the M-Audio but it has a nice sound and proper balanced inputs compared to the 1010LT (with the break-out cable).

I hope this is of some help to people. This is not meant to be an attack on creative, I just think they need to pull their finger of their arse and write some proper drivers, and design the card better - it's not like they haven't had enough time - this is just the latest in a long line of similar cards. I think perhaps they should just stop trying to do to many things with one card. Let EMU handle the pro-audio and let Creative to the cards for the gamers.

I kind of like my Audigy 2 Platinum Pro. My only complaint is that the low latency drivers only work at 48k, but I knew that before I bought it.

Why do I like it? I normally use the digital in with a Roland preamp that has a digital out, and into Roland monitors with a digital in, so the sound quality is the same as anything else I might use - perfect.

Here's what I like:

1) I get as low as 2ms latency without problems, though I normally use about 5 just for safety.

2) The hardware soundfont engine is 64 voice polyphonic and has the velocity filter routings that are in the soundfont 2.1 spec but missing from the regular Soundblaster 2.0 spec. It sounds gorgeous. I use Awave Studio 9.x which when combined with the Audigy 2 gives you a hardware 64 voice sampler which can read almost any format of sample. I like that I can embed the soundfonts into Sonar sequences.

3) The hardware reverb and effects are accessable from the cakewalk mixer as aux sends which is way cool and not available with any other sound card that I know of.

4) There is full low latency ASIO surround sound support (though 24/96 is only stereo).

5) Each input and output has it's own ASIO driver so you never really have to mess around with the Creative Labs mixer to do input or bouncing routings. If you have different things plugged into the analog and SPDIF inputs, say a mic and a POD, you can record them at the same time and select and monitor them directly from Sonar. The "ASIO outs available as ASIO ins" thing means you can record your mix straight into Soundforge if you're using the hardware sampler voices and hardware reverb.

The 48k thing used to be frustrating, but Sony CD Architect has made it a piece of cake. I just record at 48k and master at 48k/24 bits. CD Architect does a high quality sample and bit rate conversion on the fly.

I know that nobody else seems to like this card, and I'm not evangelical about it or anything, but I really wouldn't trade it for anything else. If I inherited a system with a different sound card, the first thing I would do would be to replace it with the Audigy 2 Platinum Pro.

Mlockett:

I'd get about -50dB of self-noise

I'd noticed that when using my SB Audigy 2, but I'd always thought that was just regular computer noise.

I have been defending my Audigy 2 for a while, but I now wish I'd gone for the M-Audio Delta 66. *slaps forehead*

To be fair, it does have good game support but I've now found that making music is a lot more fun and have pretty much stopped gaming altogether.

Anyone wanna buy an Audigy 2?

SG

Thanks for the tip!

I hesitate to reply to this at all because of the absolute ignorance on the Net about everything in general, but...anyone who can't get terrific sounds out of a SB Live or later SB card simply doesn't know what they're doing. I use an Echo MIA card these days but can't really say there's a difference. The noise floor in a SB Live is around 90db. That's as close to dead silence as you're ever gonna need. I've got recordings with as many as 28-tracks that I've made on the old SB Live and there's not a tad of noise on them. If you stick to the recording defaults of 16/48 that the card is meant to be used at, there's not a thing in the world wrong with a SB Live.

I haven't tried either the Audigy or Audigy2 but I can't believe they're worse.

I've posted plenty of samples of work I've done with the SB Live before and had people try to figure out which tracks were done with the SB Live and which with the Echo MIA and no one's been able to tell the difference yet. It's like trying to find someone who can tell the difference between recordings at 16/44.1 and 24/96. Regardless of the great ears everyone claims to have, no one can tell the difference when you test them on it. Besides, it never fails that every kid who gets on the Net and posts, "This is crap!", and talks about their great gear, always has music files that sound like they were recorded by a 6th grader. Ever listen to anything in the "Songs" forum? It's totally sad in there.

I'll offer only one sample. It has 26-tracks as I recall and not a single hokey midi instrument, or keyboard of any kind. Everything was recorded via microphone except the electric guitar which went through a VAMP and the acoustic guitars were recorded with a Sunrise pickup through a BOSS AD5 preamp. This song won't make it to an album because I hate the vocals. But the sound is quite satisfactory. I dare you to find any noise in it.

http://deep.phpwebhosting.com/~hackett/arrow.mp3

I can assure you that my much ballyhooed Echo MIA card sounds no better whatsoever. Nor will yours.

Hi gbhost.

Yes. I used the Audigy 2 Platinum EX for a couple of years without any major problems (no glitches, crashes etc). The 16bit 48kHz ASIO drivers worked pretty well in Sonar, and I was able to actually route things to the onboard DSP of the card! Yep, a hardware reverb on an aux send... pretty neat, and its DSP effects aren't too bad either. You'll be stuck with WDM for Cakewalk 9 though. If you aren't a purist looking for a bit-perfect recording, and want to dabble with games, multimedia (DV, firewire etc) then the Audigy is for you. It is a good 'all-rounder'. Just remember to keep your sample rate at 48kHz because that's what the card operates at internally, and the Emu 10k1/2 chips are locked at that. However, I'm aware that the Platinum EX I had contained some decent ADCs in the breakout box (Texas Instruments made I believe) which would work at 24bit and AFAIK, when using the 24bit 96kHz ASIO driver, this bypassed the Emu chip and also the 48kHz lock, so it was possible to work at 24bit 96kHz, using the ASIO driver without access to the onboard DSP effects of the card (since they are part of the Emu chip). Remember, you'll need Sonar 2.2 or later (or any other ASIO compatable host) to be able to use ASIO drivers though, and search the forum to see why it's preferable (but not necessary) to work in 24bit, and also for information on how digital audio works, with explanations of samplerate and bit depth. If you set the samplerate to something else using the WDM driver, it will just resample to 48kHz, send the signal through the card, then resample back to what you set it to anyway and that's where you'll lose a bit of quality. Convert to 44.1kHz from 48kHz if you want to create a CD compatible track at the end of your mix. I'm not too sure about the quality of this conversion process in Cakewalk 9 but Sonar 3.1.1 does this extremely well. You can always export it as 48kHz and convert it in Sound Forge or something else with a high quality algorythm if Cakewalk isn't up to it. Good luck, and if you get any trouble or don't quite understand something, ask away and the lovely people of these forae will give you a helping hand.

Regards,

Neil.

"(I found that hard to believe, but I'm just repeating what the guy told me)"

Yeah, well...I wouldn't put too much stock in half the info you pick up from the Internet. There's an awful lot of kids in Internet forums desperate to be "somebody" if you get my drift. I mean, really, I won't snow you, I'm 45, and I'm not a computer scientist. I "did" go thru a 1-year certificate program in computer repair from a local Jr. College in the late 80's, but that doesn't make me an expert in anything. I work on my own box and those for family and friends, but I don't work on computers for a living. I've been very involved with "using" computers for quite some time however; I know and use about 50-plus programs including a lot of video, audio, and graphics and many, many office oriented proggys. Here's a screenshot of just a few I have in shortcut folders:



I repeat, I'm no expert, but I've been doing this computer thing a long time and I have the advantage of having owned a couple of SB cards myself as well as 2-Dell machines, so I think I can at least speak from common sense and firsthand knowledge about your situation, if not as an expert. And unlike the "talkers" on Internet forums, you'll notice that I'm about the only guy who has actually posted material recorded on both an SB Live and a higher end Echo card. The SB detractors generally just talk....

Unless you got a faulty card out of the box, (which is rare), then there's obviously another problem. I don't know diddly about MOTU products or how they work with SB cards. But I'd like to try and help you with your problem if I can. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to run a ton of DirectX effects with your setup. You've got a fly in the ointment somewhere and its not likely with the SB card. Chances are that you'd have the same exact problem with any other card. Are you using the firewire port on the Audigy unit? Don't! Get a dedicated firewire card for your firewire transfers. How many processes are running when you bring up Task Manager? If there's more than 15 or so, you need to turn some stuff off. Are there programs placing themselves on startup during the boot sequence? If you aren't sure, there's a great free program called Startup Control Panel that will help you get junk off the start menu here:

Startup Control Panel

You might be surprised just how much stuff is loading itself at startup, everything from printers and scanners to...well, all kinds of stuff. The only thing you want on from boot up are Windows processes. You can safely remove anything else by taking a checkmark out of the box. (This is a great program anyway; if you ever get a virus or Trojan, they can often be disabled from this program.)

Go through every single program you have and make sure that nothing (including Windows) can do automatic updates.

Disable System Restore from all drives.

Under System Properties "Advanced Tab" and on the "Performance Tab" choose, "Settings", then under visual effects, "Adjust For Best Performance", and under "Advanced" make sure "Performance" is checked in both boxes. You should generally allow XP to choose your page file. It does this much better than older versions of Windows did. Every so often though, its good to shut off the page file and defragment the Windows Hard Drive so the page file can get defragged, and then restart and go back to letting Windows choose your page file size again, then reboot again.

Obviously, go into CMOS and change it so that the system board sound is disabled.

Make a habit of deleting temp files after every boot up and defrag at least twice per week.

Also, read my post here because I list a few more tools that are nice to have:

Tools

A lot of guys will tell you stuff about partitioning hard drives and messing around with shared IRQ's. That's stuff from the stone age. There's no point whatsoever in partitioning hard drives on machines running Pen 3's and later. And XP seldom has problems selecting proper IRQ's. Changing your soundcard slot generally won't help, but it doesn't hurt to try as a last resort.

I'd like to know if you have problems running effects when your MOTU unit isn't hooked into Firewire.

Joe

Sorry for taking so long to respond, and thanks for the advice. I will try out the things you suggested for sure. You are not the first to advise getting a dedicated firewire card, so I'll definitely give that a try. In fact the poster I was reffering to (who prefers to remain anonymous) also mentioned I should get a dedicated firewire connection if I want to stick with the Audigy. (he was actually very complimentary about the Audigy overall)

In fairness to the other poster, he too claimed to have pretty impressive credentials working with computers. He didn't seem the type that wanted to spout off about his knowlege on the forum because he sent me a very lengthy run down about Dell and the Audigy card via private e-mail, so his motive was definitely not to try and impress other forumites.

Thanks for the encouragement. I am eager to try the things you and others have suggested and I am very curious to see what Audigy owners have to say when Sonar 4 is released. I mentioned this in another thread. In light of the fact that S4 is going to support surround sound, there is no way they didn't do some tweaking of their own to make Sonar run more smoothly with the Audigy series in general.

I have always thought that Audigy bashing was a bit fishy since so many people with excellent credentials say otherwise. I checked the list of Twelve Tone approved cards for Cakewalk, and Audigy cards were on it, including mine, and the June 2004 edition of PC upgrade magazine had a feature on a DIY DAW and they picked the Audigy 2 ZS Gamer as their sound card of choice.

Anyway thanks to you and the others who have given advice as to how to optimize Audigy 2 in my workstation. I'm already begining to see some results, and realizing that part of my problem is sheer user ignorance on my part.