Heh, no. (though I will admit to owning an Audigy 2 Platinum ) Oh dear god, this needs correcting. For movies, surround sound is beneficial. For games, it's...marginally better, but a good stereo setup can beat the snot out of it. But for music, stereo is and will always be better than surround. How many ears do you have? Two. When music is recorded, what is it recorded at? Stereo. What's better for listening to music? Stereo. How can you take something recorded in stereo, use shitty technology to mix it into surround, and call it better than leaving it stereo? And a CD player, a decent amp, and two speakers will whip any PC sound any day. I'm going to make a prediction and say that in front of your Audigy 2, you have surround sound "omguber" Logitech or Creative speakers, or any other set of PC speakers. If you want real sound, do yourself a favor: sell off that Audigy 2 and those speakers, buy a decent sound card, and get a real amp and a couple of good bookshelf speakers. I'm also predicting that you either rip CD's at 128kbps MP3, or you download songs encoded at 128kbps. Again, that's utterly horrid. If you're going to go MP3 (or any other lossy format), at least go 192kbps, if not much higher. And if you have a ton of extra time, 100GB of free space, and you actually own the CD's, go lossless I think I'm psychic! (Either that or psycho )
better not let dom hear you, or else you'll suffer the rant about the correct soundstage and whatnot... Creative cards would be a LOT better if their drivers didn't SUCK. I downloaded the newest ones off their site, gave me some bs about not the right card or previous drivers (wtf? it's a new file, it doesn't edit the old one!!). Right now I've just got it pulled out, and will probably stick it in my media center and use it's digital out. With my speakers, whatever onboard that's on the A8N-SLI-D (alc850?) is fine. I'll have to wait and see, maybe this thing will give creative a good name with people who know more about their computer than "128mb graphics!!!!1111". But every review I read praised the Audigy2ZS Plat, and tbh I'm not that impressed. Maybe it's my speakers, but the driver support is worse than terrible (not to mention just plain buggy). Once I pick up the z5500's I want I might give it another chance, which I should seeing that the card to front panel cable is stuck and ziptied into place in my v2000. /edit - huh, guess that just below the quote applies to zephyr too... but in all fairness, 99.6% of PC users can't be arsed to do anything more than go to the store and pick up a set of speakers. Yes, I'd love something ultra high end, but PC-intended speakers always carry a convenience factor, and more than one set is pretty nice, at least relative to the $5 "oh wow, dell gives me speakers too! they think of everything" speakers.
http://www.soundblaster.com/products/x-fi/technology/music/ that just isnt possible.. its just going to perverse the signal further and give you the impression that its better. and of course theyre advocating the need for giant 50-piece speaker systems, when you really only need two for the most excellent sound possible. an interesting read for audio enthusiasts and the general impressionable consumer alike: http://www.tnt-audio.com/topics/realstereo_e.html
All of this is correct tbh. The drivers are absolutely horrid. Bloated, uncooperative, nasty things they are. In my new rig, I'll be using the onboard of my DFI SLi-D until I decide to go for an M-Audio Revolution, but until then, I expect the onboard will do me just fine. Trying to sell my Audigy 2 atm (though I never thought about keeping it for my HTPC ). Creative is all flash and no dash, imo. It's always been marketed to the less computer-savvy consumer. Even if you're quite computer-intelligent, but aren't familiar with PC sound, the Creative line may look intruiging. But if you dig below the shiny surface and flashy marketing, you'll find nothing but lies. "Puts the sparkle back in MP3"? Please. As McShaggy said, it's impossible to take something encoded at 128kbps and make it any better. That's like saying that with a 7800GTX, I can make games at 640*480, no eye candy and all low settings look like 1600*1200 res, 8xAA 16xAF, all settings on high. It's just not possible. If it's low to begin with, nothing is going to make it any better. And I would whip out the talk about soundstages and such, but I wouldn't know very well what I was talking about. Dom_ can do it much better
The correct soundstage, from my reading of dom's stuff is that if you take an accurate model of a human head, stick mics in the ears, and stick that where you wanted the perspective from, the curves and bumps of the ear would direct the sound into the mic in the way it would natrually go there. So when you play it back in a stereo system, the natrual 3d soundstage is already embedded in the two-channel audio. However in all fairness.... I took a burned audio CD consisting of various bitrate mp3 files. Some were constant bitrate, some were variable between like 128 and 320, iirc. Anyways, I wanted to put that in my car's cd player but wanted to test it out as I was in a hurry and didn't want to leave and find out it didn't work. I dug up the only normal cd player I could find, a Kenwood from back when CD's were just starting to exist (read: 5% cds, 95% casettes at stores). Slapped it in, played fine. Noticed a "Live" button... pushed it... my jaw literally dropped. Heard things out of it that I've never heard before, even on the original CD (of the ones that weren't downloaded). Amazing 3d-like echo, really just sounded amazing. And on crappy $15 headphones too. Point being that it's not impossible. Yes, that bit with the video is, but not with audio (although if it were the same resolution, it could be theoretically possible, almost like the "free antialiasing" the xbox360 gets). It took music ripped to mp3 at a relatively low bitrate and made it sound better than the originals did while using crappy headphones - if I didn't know better, I'd have thought I was using some $150+ set by how it sounded. The thing features a "1BIT dual d/a converter" (yes, it's actually bolded on the player) and "AI sound processor", manufactured April 1993. So not only can it happen, it's 12+ year old tech.
What the "Live" button did was, most probably, change the EQ of the sound. Drag the highs up, lower the midrange, tich the lows just a bit. This can be done with any sound, in any way. It's the same idea as "ULTRA BASS OMGBBQ" found on most boom boxes. However, all this does is further process the sound. The true goal of hifi is to get take sound and make it as real as possible. Technically, if you wanted true sound, you would take a vinyl record, get a $10,000 deck, $5,000 arm, $5,000 cartridge, and get a good external power supply, and run it through a good valve amp to good stereo speakers. However, dom_ is about the only one who is that insane around here , so the rest of us just have to settle. However, the idea should be _less_ sound processing, not more.
As an audio layman, I find the simplest way to weigh up soundcards is with the following analogy: £15 sound card = Interconnects that come with CD Player £50 sound card = Decent interconnects bought seperately >£50 sound card = Expensive interconnects bought seperately Top of the range sound card = The people who buy stupidly expensive interconnects and claim they can tell the difference.
not entirely accurate, as far as reproducing original recordings goes valve amps arent very transparent at all valves introduce a lot of interesting character into the audio signal, its just that most of it is desirable and thats why valve amps are so popular. but theyre far from being the thing to get if you want to reproduce an original recording 100%
This thread makes me wanna cry :'/ we have already talked about this creative x-fi in another thread in audio and visual, giving it a better bashing based on its stupid claims. as for not telling the difference between types of soundcards... try not using £3 speakers, it might help. cant be arsed reading all the rest, and either way it will probably end up with all the "omg creative are the best with my 60000watt sub 5.1 system that cost me £10" if i did discuss it more edit: and while im ranting, why isnt this in the av forum? edit2: ok.. so a SOUNDcard thread is now in hardware and overclocking not AUDIO visual...
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=90958 I already said my piece in this thread, I hope it solves all the problems with the Audigy series of cards but from what I've read elsewhere it's not going to be anything more than another gaming card with shitty sound quality for music and too much hype. I want to be proved wrong but it's not looking hopeful... EDIT - And I'm quite happy to keep this thread in HW&OC for the time being, AV already has a thread about the X-Fi and this has turned into more of a hardware discussion
the funny part being that if they happened to do a search on soundcards in the av forums they could read rants going at least 2-3 years back of how creative cards on a simple level just suck!... but then again the search button is sooO far away....
Now if they claim that their soundcard had a P4 3GHZ processor, why don't they "hack" the hardware so that the soundcard can be used for encoding decoding Videos and Music and do shared processing between the CPU and the AUDIO CPU. Heck, that will be a number one seller then. Edit: On their site they claim to have a P4 3GHZ processor on the audio chipset.
" Imagine having the power of a second 3.4GHz processor (more than 10,000MIPS) built into your PC that was dedicated just to audio! That's enough additional power to process more than 10 Billion instructions per second! With X-Fi that's exactly what you get!" Yea they do...
The "power" of a 3.4GHz processor doesn't mean there's an actual P4 on there - they're just taking one number (MIPS) off a CPU performance chart and saying "oh wow this'll make the card look better, we'll use that line". It wouldn't look so impressive if they said "a second 2.3GHz processor" (10k mips is about what my A64 puts out) would it? It's like saying your milkfloat gets a similar MPG to a Ferrari, so it's as good. That sentence you've quoted is one of the worst examples of overhyping in their releases so far, just because a processor is capable of 10 billion instructions per second doesn't mean it uses them efficiently, or that it even uses them at all. Potential (which is there, though not as good as they'd like you to think) doesn't always mean the end product is gonna be great.
It's not a card at all yet, just a processor. It'll be a lot easier to tell how good the cards made with it will be when they come out and people can see what DACs they use, what the software/hardware features are, and what the total package is going to be like as regards the card, its I/O options, and breakout boxes etc. I'm not really interested in anything but the bare card - all I want is something that gives good gaming performance while NOT ****ing around with my music ) We'll find out in a couple of days now, release of an X-Fi card is just around the corner. As an interesting side-note, the page linked in the first post now redirects to www.soundblaster.com - you can't see X-Fi info any more. Are they doing a sneaky changearound of the specs so nobody can call them out for overhyping, or is it just in preparation for release? Call me a skeptic...
No, it definately wasn't just EQ work. You'd have had to heard it in person, but there was a definate reverb/echo added in, not just tweaking the highs and lows. But again people, don't bash it so thoroughly until you've heard it. I too highly doubt it can live up to any of those claims, but it IS possible. I'll just be laughing for about a month straight if the various 32kbit mp3s (don't ask, but at the time I didn't really notice a difference between 32 and 320kbit by speakers were so crap) I have sound better than dom's uber-vinyl setup that was sure to cost an arseload and a half more than this X-fi thing. /edit - just browsed the site a bit more, it kinda sounds like it won't do a damn thing for music quality unless you use their crap software for both ripping and playing. And for that alone, hellz naw!
Guess that was you that i knifed in the back last night... I listen to my music in stereo I don't, and if i wanted to, i press "2x Stereo" on my speakers and it sends the L and R to both Front and Rear. Sounds better without any mixing or distorting or anything. audigy 2 zs platnium and logitech z-5500 I haven't ripped a CD in years, mainly because i haven't bought a CD in over 10 years. Its rare that i even do listen to music on my computer, but if i was to rip a CD, i would use loss-less. Most of my 1TB+ of space is for DVDs. i say its that latter. Edit: Firehead, yea the drivers do suck. I had to cheat to get mine to install.
