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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on December 17, 2001
Manufacturer: Creative
Labs Product: Sound
Blaster Audigy Player
Check
for the lowest soundcard
prices.
The
Audigy supports Windows
98SE, 2000, Millennium Edition & XP, although at that
the XP Drivers need to be downloaded (as mentioned earlier)
from Creative & installed over the CD Drivers you’ll
need to have installed.
AudioHQ
contains all the applets you’ll need to configure the
various features of the Audigy itself.
Device
Controls
allows you to adjust the Sampling rate for Digital output,
with a maximum of 96 KHz being supported, although
this will depend on the Decoder/Amplifier you are connected
to as well (With not all supporting that).
The
EAX Control Panel allows for adjustments to various
audio sources or apply different EAX effects & such to
sources. SoundFont allows you configure some
instruments & adjust the amount of RAM that can be used
for caching SoundFonts. The Speaker & Mixer
applets allow you to adjust the Volume, Speaker mode &
other settings.
The
only semi-disappointing thing here is the Audigy only
features basic Bass & Treble adjustments.
My
experiences with the Audigy in Windows XP have been
favourable with no crashes or lockups caused by the
Soundcard & most importantly no crackling/data
corruption, despite having a VIA
Southbridge
on
the Motherboard, they both got along fine (Though some on
the Creative newsgroup have reported crackling/screeching
problems).
Similar
to the Hercules Game Theater XP which made featured 4 USB
ports & thus opened up some interesting connectivity
possibilities (Ever connected an USB Digital Camera &
Printer to your Live! 5.1? thought not.). Creative also
seems to have noticed the possibilities this can offer &
have went that extra bit further with the Audigy –
Integrating an IEEE-1394 Controller into the Soundcard with
a single port available for use by an IEEE-1394 device
(Compatibility of such devices with the Audigy can be
verified with the SB1394
Certification Program).
Whereas
USB offers the ability to connect a wider variety of
devices, IEEE-1394 offers a great deal more bandwidth –
400Mbps, isn’t reliant on the CPU, & is supported by a
good deal of Storage devices & Digital Camcorders, with
other Devices being equally capable of working also. Another
interesting possibility it offers is Networking,
potentially connecting up to another 64 systems, mentioned
in this Creative
article.
Certainly
the addition of the IEEE-1394 Controller is a welcome
feature, with separate Controllers costing a good portion of
what the Audigy Player does ;). Unfortunately, I have no
IEEE-1394 devices and can’t really comment on its use. You
can read further information about IEEE-1394 & its
benefits at Microsoft.
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