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Posted by
Thomas
McGuire on July 9, 2002
Manufacturer: Creative Product:
Creative
Sound Blaster Extigy
Search
for Sound
Blaster Extigy prices.
Though the box & all may claim EAX
Advanced HD support, it is only partial EAX Advanced HD support.
That is it only supports the Music Technologies & not the
gaming features, which the Audigy does. The Audigy uses the EMU 10K2
DSP, whereas the Extigy uses a seemingly unnamed one (Thanks Harvey),
suffice to say it’s not the EMU 10K2 DSP with the more powerful
effects engine.
As
such these features are only accessible if PlayCenter is installed (You
can read more about PlayCenter at SoundBlaster.com
if you wish).
Selecting
the EAX button gives access to these features. First up there is
the Audio Effects tab.
Here
you can apply a limited number of environmental presets to the audio
source being played & adjust the strength of the effect also.
Compared to the Audigy at least the number of presets available is more
limited, for example, the Audigy featured EQ presets for Classical,
Rock, etc. music. Still these may be of use to some of you, though
it’s worth pointing out this is not one the EAX Advanced HD
Music Technology features.
Now
onto the Time Scaling tab, which is the first of the 3 Music
Technology features.
This
feature does exactly what the description in the image above says, with
the most important feature of it being it doesn’t alter the pitch,
merely the playback speed is adjusted. The usefulness of this feature
will vary though & I doubt too many of you will find it of much use,
except perhaps for novelty purposes.
Next
up there’s the DREAM tab.
DREAM
is a unique enough feature, allowing you to swirl audio sources around
you, you can even adjust the frequencies which do so, or how the rotate
(Clockwise or counter-clockwise), at what speed, etc. The effect when enabled
is convincing & works just fine. But that said, is this really of
much use to you? Certainly I know I wouldn’t playback anything in
PlayCenter with this enabled normally & that’s probably
going to be the case for most of you also. The only real use I could
honestly see for this is some sort of trick to show off to friends.
Finally
there’s the Audio Clean-Up tab.
Of all the EAX Advanced HD Music Technology features
this is the most useful one & only one I could see always
having enabled anytime I’m playing an MP3/WMA. As per the
description this helps remove audio artefacts during playback of a
supported audio source.
Given I’ve a decent enough collection of
MP3s I listen to it’s a great feature to be able to reduce/eliminate
much of the artefacts introduced to these files when they were encoded,
though this will also depend on how well they were encoded, or not too
of course. Using the slider bars the aggressiveness of the artefact
removal can be adjusted accordingly.
Overall the EAX Advanced HD support in the
Extigy is extremely limited & certainly Audio Clean-Up is
about the only redeeming feature of what is available.
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