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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on December 17, 2001
Manufacturer: Creative
Labs Product: Sound
Blaster Audigy Player
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 The
Audigy is Creative’s latest Soundcard range, a long
overdue upgrade to the aging Live! range and coming in a
year where Creative have faced some of their stiffest
competition since the Aureal Vortex 2 was released; rather
than just the Aureal DSP to deal with they now have Philips
PSC 70x plus several other soundcards based on the Cirrus
Logic 4624 & 4630 DSP (Several of which we’ve reviewed
here). So is Creative onto another winning range again with
Audigy?
As
you’ve probably heard me say before, all latest drivers
& any relevant BIOS Updates were installed. Before
getting really into the review I’d just like to
point out that being that this is the Player version of the
Audigy I won’t be going into details such as Recording
& similar given that this edition of the Audigy isn’t
really intended for such, rather the Platinum & Platinum
Ex are.
The
printed manual of the Audigy Player consisted on a basic Quick
start guide with basic installation instructions, while
the complete manual was included on the CD in PDF format; it
covers basically everything you’ll need to know about the
soundcard. Pretty much like the two
Live! Cards I’ve owned before, the Manuals are well
written & thorough.
Installation
of the SoundBlaster Audigy wasn’t difficult, hardware wise
at least – uninstalled the Game Theater XP software, shut
down the PC & removed that card from my system. I then
inserted the SoundBlaster Audigy into the now free PCI slot.
I then connected the MIDI/Gameport bracket to the Audigy via
the MIDI/Gameport connector near the centre of the
Soundcard. You may recall in our review of the TerraTec
SiXPack 5.1 it also featured a separate MIDI/Gameport
bracket – in comparison the cable length of the SiXPack
5.1’s bracket was about 10.5 inches, whereas the
Audigy’s is around 6 inches.
This
shouldn’t really be much cause for concern unless you
intend to insert the MIDI/Gameport bracket into a free port
that’s not adjacent to the Audigy. That said, you aren’t
required to connect the MIDI/Gameport bracket at all – the
Audigy can, & does function just as well with or without
it.
Upon
booting up Windows 2000 & XP the Soundcard was detected
& appropriate Drivers requested. I cancelled out of
those & proceeded to load the Installation CD.
The CD loads up with a quick Creative Intro, then onto your
Language choice. Selecting the first option available – SoundBlaster
Audigy, allows you to install Drivers for the Soundcard,
along with several other Utilities & Applications from
Creative. This is where the problems begin.
After
going through Language & EULA (End User
License Agreement) you are given 3 options as
regards to Setup Options;
My
main problem with these options is that regardless of what
one you select the Drivers must get installed. As I
always do whenever possible I selected Custom
Installation, options available being:
As
you can see, there is no option regarding Driver
Installation. This is some cause for concern, in my
opinion, because should you wish to go back at a later date
& install something else from the above listing it will
attempt to over-write your existing Driver installation,
particularly important if you’ve upgraded your Drivers. As
fate would have it I had installed the newer Windows 2000/XP
Drivers onto my system when I then needed to go &
install Creative PlayCenter.
During
the re-installation of the older CD Drivers towards
the end of the install process I was prompted with 3 error
messages & 1 Windows File Protection error as a result
of this. To verify my Drivers weren’t affected I removed
them via Add/Remove Programs & downloaded the
latest ones from Creative. When I tried to install these I
was prompted that I needed to have the CD Drivers installed
first & then the Installer quit.
Once
more I had to reinstall the Drivers from the CD, reboot then
Reinstall the latest Drivers I’d downloaded. Why? Because
of Creative’s messed up Installation CD (I wonder
what genius was responsible for this “wise” decision,
don’t you). Hopefully Creative will do 2 things in a short
space of time;
1.
Issue
any updated Installation CD with the option to not
install the Drivers during the installation process – This
merely need be an option in the Custom Installation
menu. As from my experiences (& others) this would
alleviate many unnecessary headaches & problems.
-
Post
Full Drivers for download on the Creative
Website. It should not be a requirement to have the CD
Drivers installed in order to update them. With all
of the other Soundcards I’ve reviewed in the past year
or more the Audigy is the only Soundcard I’ve received
which requires this.
A
workaround to this is to copy the contents of the CD to your
Hard Drive & edit the audio.ini, setting &
setting WinDrv = 0. That said you should not
have to this something awkward like this to simply
avoid installing the Drivers, its plain stupidity on
Creative’s part as far as I’m concerned. After
installation Device Manager displays the following 3 new
Devices as having been installed.
Full
Tech Specs for the Audigy on the next page, if you want to
bypass those, go directly here.
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