Article Type: Review
Article Date: December 18, 2001
That Was Then
Not long ago I was digging through some boxes and found an original Sound Blaster Pro ISA. This board dates from 1992, and was used in my 486/50, a hot machine in its day.
What surprised me was that it looks much like the Audigy. Appearances can be deceiving!
Creative established the sound standard somewhere around 1988 with their original Sound Blaster. While sound boards no longer have to be concerned about "Sound Blaster compatibility", Creative is still one of the best known names in the business. Their SB Live almost redefined the gaming audio genre, and is still one of the most common sound boards in gaming PCs on desktops in North America.
Eventually the Sound Blaster line went upscale, with fancy music editing software, gold plated 3.5mm jacks and the inclusion of left and right stereo RCA jacks. A gamer could purchase an all in one sound solution from Creative Labs, and the Audigy follows in this tradition.
The Full Meal Deal
The Audigy DSP is a total solution in one chip, providing 3D positional audio, advanced HRTF support, EAX, and acceleration of DirectSound/DirectSound3D audio streams. Whew, that’s quite a mouthful.
While the SB Live! had support for DirectSound3D and Creative's own EAX (environmental audio extensions) engine, DirectSound3D was a generic solution. Creative felt that its EAX created a more immersive experience than true 3D effects rendering such as those offered by Aureal, but many others felt that Aureal's and Sensaura's solutions, modeled from actual physical environments, were superior. The debate lives on, but Audigy has gone a long way to making the arguments moot.
Audigy is not an ordinary sound card. Each board includes support for IEEE-1394 (FireWire). The quality of its output—24 bit, 96KHz audio—supports the ability to process audio in hardware.
 |
Technical specs  |
The Package
The SB-1394 internal and external connectors are available on every Audigy card, whether it's in the MP3 or Platinum eX bundle. It's also important note that the SB-1394 supports non-Creative Labs devices as well as Creative's own. This means that a FireWire CD-RW, hard drive, digital video camera or anything else can be used (but more on this later).
Depending on which Audigy package you buy, Creative bundles different software. The Audigy MP3 and XGamer have the smallest bundles and the Platinum and Platinum eX have the most expansive.
PlayCenter 3 is like Creative's end-all, be-all multimedia jukebox. It has all the controls for playback that one would expect and can even play back AC3 audio files.
 |
| Playcenter: This one has matured |
What I like about PlayCenter is the ability to write to CDs from within the program. This way, everything can be better organized, and organization is a simpler task when getting ready to burn a CD. Furthermore, adjustments are quick and easy, including bass redirection, bass/treble levels and EAX settings.
 |
| Ripping from Playcenter |
I have always liked the popup toolbar, and I find Creative’s utilities easy to use. This is a plus as sound setups get more complex and I have to discriminate between my speakers, headphones, and sub-woofer output.
For the musicians among you, Creative includes Vienna SoundFont Studio to customize the instrument palette in MIDI orchestration.
Sonic Foundry is one of the best sources for audio editing applications. ACID DJ is a mixing applications for those who are interested in mixing custom tracks or playing the DJ.
Other applications include: Oozic Reactor, Creative RemoteCenter, Creative Surround Mixer and the Goldmine Demo.
The Hardware
As I mentioned above, there isn’t much unique in the board’s appearance.
The Audigy includes all the necessary internal connections for your drives. Included are ports for: CD_IN, TAD, Aux, CD S/PDIF and an internal SB-1394 connector for those who will be using the Internal AudigyDrive or front chassis FireWire.
Creative says that the Audigy is a true 24-bit/96kHz sound card, but internally the Audigy processes all of its audio functions at 16-bit/48kHz. So what’s to boast about? The DACs and ADCs (digital/analog converter) in the Audigy are 24bit, allowing the Audigy processing headroom when it performs operations on multiple 16-bit streams. Without this headroom, for example, on the SB Live!, multiple operating streams will saturate the processor. Furthermore, when the DACs are loaded the resulting stream will have a lower quality output than the original streams.
 |
| Installation details |
This is one of the reasons that going from an SB Live! in a game that can utilize many audio streams is so noticeable. Many sim pilots flying IL-2 Sturmovik who upgraded from the SB Live! during the beta process noticed an improvement in audio fidelity. Others noticed an improvement in sound performance in general. Both are the result of a more powerful audio processor.
Installation was typically painless. I ran the uninstall program for the SB Live!, then shut down my machine and placed the Audigy in the slot previously occupied by the Live! When the machine rebooted the Audigy detected and installed from the CD.
 |
| Help in PDF docs |
There was no paper manual with the Audigy. Instead, the manual comes in PDF format. It’s a fairly comprehensive document which I have referred to a few times.
Advanced Features
 |
| The mixer |
The Audigy is a much more capable board than the SB Live! when it comes to audio positioning. In its earlier incarnations, EAX was not an honest 3D technology because it was built on preset reverb algorithms. With the Live! the DSP modulated the sound stream and added in canned fades and echoes in order to simulate a certain environment. That’s right…you were running a simulation within a simulation!
While in some environments the simulation was a good one (it worked), at other times it really wasn’t very effective.
Creative recognized the limitations, and they also recognized that gamers had found better solutions out there. This led to a reworking of EAX into EAX Advanced HD. Creative has added four new features to EAX:
 |
| Popup toolbar |
- EAX Multi-Environment
- EAX Environment Morphing
- EAX Environment Panning
- EAX Environment Reflections
How did they manage to do this? With the fall of Aureal, Creative acquired Aureal's intellectual property. Sound familiar? Just as NVIDIA is now benefiting from 3dfx technology, it seems that Creative is benefiting from the work of Aureal.
Each of these four technologies deals with mixing environments together in a realistic way. Multi-Environment is the management and blending of unique environments. Let’s say you are in a cockpit. A cockpit is a particular sound environment. It’s an enclosed space with a lot of metal, a human, and a bit of cloth. It is surrounded by plexiglass, and externally by a lot of air or earth. But there is another environment outside the cockpit. The four new EAX technologies operate to mix environments in a realistic manner, because when you are in one environment, you can still hear sounds from other environments. The Audigy can render four unique environments.
Environment Morphing allows you to travel from one environment inside a game to another environment without having the sounds simply cut off in one and start in another; this is the environment transition technology.
For example, let’s say you are just climbing into your cockpit. You go through your initial system checks and talk to the tower. An aircraft lands on the runway next to you. After getting initial clearances, you close the canopy. You power up and check in with the tower again. Now an aircraft taxis by in front of you. The way you hear sounds when you're inside the cockpit versus having the cockpit closed, and the way your environment changes as you start the engine and later as you take off at 150 mph has to change. If you're running the Audigy, at each transition point you will hear different acoustical environments.
 |
| EAX control panel |
Environment Panning tells you what direction the particular environment is in. This also allows the sound designer to account for the distance to the environment and its motion.
Environment Reflections were previously limited to reverb and the DirectSound3D system. Now we are able to hear sounds being reflected off various mediums. Sounds can now be manipulated according to the objects that enter or leave an environment.
Say you are stepping into the cockpit of a B-17 bomber. You are the only one in the cockpit, and the environment is extremely live. Then your co-pilot enters, and then the navigator. The environment has changed slightly, and the sound designer can implement these changes.
 |
| Cockpit in IL2 Sturmovik |
Everything that SB Live! users are accustomed to have found their way into the Audigy drivers. The usual tools and device settings can be accessed through AudioHQ. Some of the more advanced features like DREAM and Audio Cleanup can only be used if the PlayCenter is installed.
How does it Sound?
Honestly, I can’t tell any difference in my MP3 files on the Audigy as compared to the SB Live! I have in my other machine. I hear the same sounds, however…
When the volume goes up, I can hear some background noise in the SB Live! that I don’t hear in the Audigy. Sound production does seem to be a bit cleaner.
I did find, however, that the bass and treble sliders default to around 50 percent on the mixer. Placing these at 75 percent didn’t make any difference in noise output, but it increased the fullness of the sound at low and middle volumes.
DREAM Technology
Creatives’ DREAM technology takes any stereo or mono sound source and breaks it into 5.1 channels. Handy for those older stereo recordings. Time Scaling allows adjustment of audio playback speed without changing the pitch of the audio.
The S/PDIF output on the Audigy is rated at 48kHz. Digital recording output can be done via the digital S/PDIF copper output or by using the TOSLink optical out connectors available on the external or internal AudigyDrive.
Recording can be done from multiple sources simultaneously. The Audigy can be set to record from the CD_IN, the Optical In and the Line In all at the same time.
 |
| Audio HQ |
The Audigy is ready to handle 5.1 channels with both analog and digital connections. The Audigy's I/O plate boasts a heap of connectors for both analog and digital systems. It has the typical front and rear stereo speaker jacks but lacks dedicated jacks for subwoofer and center channel. Creative uses the digital coaxial S/PDIF output for both digital and analog and provides the analog signal for the center and subwoofer channel.
I tested audio using the new DVD release of Pearl Harbor on my 5.1 surround system. Sound reproduction was excellent using the InterActual Player. The Audigy can decode Dolby Digital 5.1 at a driver level, but only if the digital S/PDIF is used (both optical and coaxial will work for this).
Performance Tests
I ran tests on the Audigy, the SB Live! X-Gamer, and the Hercules Game Theatre XP on a 1.5 GHz Athlon system with 512 MB of DDRAM. Video was supplied by the OCZ Titan 3 GeForce 3.
 |
| Comparisons |
The difference between the Audigy and the Live! are quite amazing. In the more demanding tests where 16 or 32 audio streams are being played simultaneously, the Audigy leads over the Live! by a huge margin. Compared to the Live! the Hercules Game Theatre is a good performer, staying close to the Audigy's numbers .
 |
| The basic chart |
I checked Tom’s Hardware for nForce numbers, and added them to the chart for a theoretical comparison. It doesn’t look like Creative is in great danger from nForce, though the fact that this kind of performance will be available with ON BOARD sound at a much smaller cost than an add-in board is a bit shocking.
In-game performance bears out these numbers. With the first patch release I am able to run with all advanced settings on and my frame rates do not drop no matter how active the scenario becomes. You might say, “Sure, but that’s because you have a 1.5 GHz system with GF3.”
It’s not quite that simple, however, since I know others with 1.5 GHz systems and GeForce3 and other sound boards who are not seeing the results I am seeing. Furthermore, I have detail in IL-2 Sturmovik at maximum and I run at 1280x1024 and 32-bit color.
Granted, there are many simulations out there, particularly older ones, which won’t use more than eight channels. IL-2, however, will use more than eight channels, and sound designers are rapidly taking advantage of the increasingly advanced abilities of sound hardware.
Drivers and Compatibility
Very recently Creative posted drivers for XP on their website. So far reports are mixed, but generally performance is good and the drivers have enabled some players to run the Audigy with stability in games that were previously unstable.
The Audigy’s performance in IL-2 so far has been almost flawless. Under WIN ME I’ve been running full sound acceleration since the release of the game, something that players could not do with the SB Live! The only issue I have had with IL-2 is an inability to use the built-in voice streams, though I have had no trouble using Roger Wilco in IL-2.
 |
| Sound setup in IL2 Sturmovik |
I have also run Silent Hunter II, F22: Total Air War, Falcon 4.0, Comanche 4, Combat Flight Simulator 2 and Flight Simulator 2002 without issue. The sound performance in IL-2 is simply excellent. I tend to prefer the closed environment of headphones, but I also have a five speaker surround sound system that is performing very well.
Conclusions
The Audigy offers excellent fidelity, advanced effects, great control flexibility, and some very nice utilities. The user can run 5.1 channel audio, and even convert stereo into 5.1 channels.
Creative fans can finally enjoy features that were previously available only on Aureal’s boards. With Creative's new implementation of reflections and occlusions, pilots can benefit by increased immersion without worrying about bringing their system to its knees.
While the Live! gave us some nasty issues with VIA chipsets, so far the Audigy seems trouble free. In fact, the Audigy even seems to like SMP systems.
When it comes to connectivity, Creative brought along the kitchen sink. And if you want it, you can have it by purchasing the Platinum series with its AudigyDrive.
The big battle that is about to occur is between Audigy and nForce. For users who like the motherboard they currently run, Audigy is the perfect upgrade. But for those in the market for a new mainboard, they ought to seriously consider the built in audio supplied by NVIDIA in nForce. With similar performance and similar features, nForce may yet prove to be the wave of the future.
Creative Audigy Line of Sound Cards
