Creative Audigy Soundcard

[Technoid]

I have ordered one of these and I will test it with my two systems.

And Ofcourse I will torture it in my NLE machine.

[windigo]

which one did you get? the platnium or the mp3 im looking at the mp3 version for only 151$ CAN.

[Technoid]

Gamer

[Sciascia]

Technoid

Did you get it yet? I'm really curious about how it works out for you. I talked to a sales rep from some company and they said that it has the best Win2k drivers he's seen yet for a SC. Since my SC hasn't had new drivers come out since the cold war, I figure that I should go ahead and swap it out. I personaly am interested in the platinum since I want to get a firewire port as well and it seems like a pretty good combination. I used to have an old ISA 64 AWE back in the day and that thing was great, but the new Live! SC's got lambasted for PCI hogging, so I veered away. I am also worried about it being compatible with the KT133a chipset. I would hope that it is compatible, but who knows anymore. Have you heard anything about it? What CPU/MB chipset are you running?

Thanks

[Sciascia]

Well, I just stepped into it. I picked up the last Audigy "Player" at good old Atelco and it seems to be interesting to say the least. What I do like is the fact that the drivers are written for Win2k. That's a major improvement over my old MX300. The fun part was trying to install the drivers and crap. I just sent my combo DVD/CD burner out for an RMA and I forgot about it. I had to LAn my laptop and copy the disc to my capture drive. It is a full 655M! That should have been my first warning that this thing has a lot of crap. It didn't want to use the installer correctly so I had to do it the old explorer style. I have sound and about a million inputs/outputs. Plays games fine, but I cannot capture without massive drops. Well Duhh... How many times has any of you heard that? A creative card and a VIA chipset having problems. It may be going back tomorrow. Supposedly I can adjust the ASIO latency of the card and that may help. Of course I don't even know what the hell that is, but it sounds like it may be the problem to me. I was also hoping that the firewire network link cable came with it, but it did not.

It sounds all right and it works I guess, but it is not the end all be all that all of the other sites made it out to be.

If I can figure out all of this extra crap, EAX, Audio HQ, 3D sound mixer, whatever, then I will be happier, but it is just too much extra crap that I do not want. I picked it up because of the IEEE1394 , oh excuse me the "SB1394" port....

[Sciascia]

Status update...it's out. I should have known better than to waste 6 hours on this thing, but I really wanted that Firewire port. Turns out that it isn't even as good as it sounds. I did some more research on the PCI resource hogging and it turns out that it is inherent in the drivers. Apparently someone out there that knows a lot more about this kind of stuff than me figured out that it was "hijacking" the resources form the 2nd IDE controller and placing null data on the PCI bus to reserve it for "just in case" it needed it. Talk about piss poor enginnering. I ripped it out and installed it right back in the old ugly yellow box that it came in. I threw my old MX300 back in and Viola, no drops. Also no more stupid EAX and reverb and chorus on every damn thing. It took me an hour just to figure out how turn all of that crap off.

I should have known better at the store as well. They have a bunch of guys out in the open building machines right there, which is kind of interesting. I asked one of them if there were any issues with it and the VIA chipsets. He answered me in a typical snotty tone, "NO" and went back to trying to figure out how to mount a CPU cooler. I definitely would not let these guys touch my PC.

Like I said it works pretty good for games, but if it can't beat a 3 year old video card by a manufacturer that has been bought out by a company that went out of business and has a chipset on it that was made by a company that went under, that doesn't even have "real" Win2k drivers for it, then I think that I can do without it. Diamond still sucks, but not as bad as Creative Labs.

I'll be looking for a Santa Cruz tomorrow.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by Sciascia
Plays games fine, but I cannot capture without massive drops.

Well, it wouldn't be a Creative product otherwise, now would it? Just for the record I've got less than half frame-drops with my current Terratec soundcard than I had with the SBLive Platinum on any of my chipsets (AMD 750, KT133, KT266). And I'm web-surfing / doing whatever I want when capturing 'cause I can't really be bothered about the ~10 dropped frames per movie I get now after I ditched the SBLive!
Oh, and a friend of mine with a ASUS Intel BX based board also has major frame-drop problems (worse than I ever had) with the SBLive5.1 and vid-capturing - just to relieve AMD and VIA a bit, they have enough real problems, it isn't fair to also attribute this Creative Win2k hardware/driver crap to them ...

[Dr Mordrid]

What in hell are those Creative "engineers" smoking at work? I guess that might explain all the data I saw when using the FoxFire II card to monitor the SBLives bus activity. Any bets they just recycled the code?

When you get the Santa Cruz visit their download page first. A new set of Win2K/XP drivers is out and they are working great here. It's those certified drivers I posted on in Sept.

Do you still have the link to that source? I'd be VERY interested in reading it.

Dr. Mordrid

[Sciascia]

Here it is about 1/3 way down the page. It may not be accurate, but it would explain a lot.

Indiana

Yeah , I know tha tit isn't necessarily VIA. I have no problems with anything else with this new system. Of course the speed increase over my PIII 700 440BX system is very minor. I haven't really pushed it yet, too busy lately, but it has been very solid so far.

I have signal generator at home right now and I am going to do some resolution comparisons with different codecs and encoding. I thought that it may have been related to trying to use the TV tuner to capture, but even with a nice clean signal, it dropped frames after about 10-30 seconds into the capture. I also tried different slots.

Santa Cruz, here I come. Just hope the weather is noce!

[Sciascia]

I meant nice weather.

Anyway, I just got back from shopping for my new Santa Cruz. I got my money back for the Audigy and could not find the SC anywhere.

I did some surfing and found a pretty neat site for Vortex SC owners. Its called Vortex of sound and they had some neat little tips about making some beat Win2k drivers work. I did all of the install tricks, but there is a hack that fixes some of the audio dropouts during games that I did not do. I had a setting that was different than what was on the site, so I steered clear of it for now. I may try it later.

I'm still looking for the Santa Cruz, it may be alittle longer than I wanted to wait. I'm tired of ordering online, its such a pain sometimes.

[Dr Mordrid]

If you're in Europe you won't find the Santa Cruz there.

On your side of the pond it's sold as the Videologic Sonic Fury.

This is due to a cross marketing agreement between Voyetra Turtle beach and Videologic.

Dr. Mordrid

[Technoid]

Quick and Dirty Test of the Audigy...

After reading all the replyes in this topic I decided to do a "Quick and Dirty" testy of the audigy in my NLE machine.....



My NLE machine hasn't been touched in weeks.

I booted it, deinstalled Liveware for the Sblive that curently inhibits this machine.

Riped the live out and plugged the Audigy in.

Installed the neccesary parts of the software package and rebooted.

When windows98SE booted again I started AVI_IO and captured 1 hour of video from swedish chanel 1 in ful rez yuy2...

5 Dropped frames!!!

And it was in the end of the 60GB DTLA drive (had about 30gb of other video data previously).

and those dropped frames can easily be remedied by more ram (128 is a tad to little) and a better boot drive, the boot drive is a 2gb fujitsu who is slow.

The capture drive is on the second IDE cable....

I will probably get another Audigy to my NLE machine and use the firewire port as link between my systems instead of the 3com nics I have now...

As atleast my Audigy performs as promised....

[Sciascia]

I'm using Win2k and the HW MJPEG compression. I don't do anything that warrants the large file size of uncompressed video. If your drive can handle the write speed, then the CPU and every other component is doing less work, pretty much just feeding the video to a drive. I wonder if that is the difference. I also read that while the Audigy drivers for Win2k are among the best out there (for gaming) there are still some issues with them.

It may also have to do with other components in the system. What chipset and processor are you using in your NLE? I have a VIA KT133a based MB with an AMD 1.4Ghz 266 FSB. 512M SDRAMM and a FT100 with 2 WD 40G HDs.

I'm glad that it works for you, but I couldn't capture anything with it here. If I disabled audio it would capture for about 2 minutes and then either stop or just drop every frame after that point. I also don't like all of the extra crap that Creative likes to load into your system. I mean they don't even give you a real choice, it's kind of required. And that little media player thing is just bad. Their windows are ugly and hard to read. If you use high resolution (1600x1200) and large fonts then the diagnostic doesn't work, because he buttons don't show up and there is no way to resize the window. It's kind of fruity looking to boot with that lame powder blue. The one thing that I absolutley loved though was the "record what your hear" option in the mixer. That would relieve a lot of problems with me and the wife.

My old MX 300 is working like a champ with the only problem being with Max Payne and occasional audio dropout during the comic strip scenes. I did some comparisons of the 3D sound and I have to say that the Vortex chip beats EAX in my opinion. It is a shame that Aureal went under. They did make some good stuff. Hopefully that Cirrus chipset sounds as good as advertised/reviewed.

Thanks for the tip Doc, I'll look for it Monday.

[Dr Mordrid]

This info summarized from several audio SIG's and NG's;

Most folks know of the "problem" with the SBLive hogging the PCI bus, even if they disagree with the reality of it.

Roger Adam, a regular on the audio SIG's, came up with some interesting info as to why this is a real problem while running comparative tests on the SBLive and Audigy cards. Programmers will love this ;-)

Apparently the SBLive AND Audigy drivers tie up the bus by attaching themselves to the Secondary IDE enumerator. Their drivers then proceed to "reserve" bandwith by producing null data across the PCI bus, even when the card is not in use.

Guess what that does the throughput of a video drive on the secondary IDE? Even if it's not on the secondary IDE this constant hijacking of the bus could very well cause problems on other installed drive controllers. Add any other devices that push the PCI bus a bit and you're off to the races.

Another interesting thing that came out of his tests is that the "24 bit" Audigy, isn't. It's actually 19 bit and samples at only 16 bits. The good (?) thing about the Audigy is even though it still hijacks the IDE enumerator, it doesn't push quite as much null data through the PCI bus as the SBLive does.

Great ;-)

Several other audio techs have duplicated his quality tests on the Audigy and found it lacking, especially if one compares its hype to its actual results vs. the Santa Cruz.

One regular summed up the SBLive and Audigy situations;

"The crackling DOES persist with the Audigy. The freezeups and data corruption DO NOT.

Both problems are separate and are not caused by the same thing.

The CRACKLING is caused by DRIVERS.

The FREEZEUPS and DATA CORRUPTION are caused by FIRMWARE. (note: a mis-design of the ACPI hardware interface)

The FIRMWARE is FIXED with the Audigy.

The DRIVERS are NOT FIXED.

NEITHER issue is VIA's fault.

BOTH issues are CL's fault."

CL = Creative Labs

Interesting.......

Dr. Mordrid

[dZeus]

Though I also get crackling sometimes when pushing the CPU hard with my sblive, though I don't have a VIA chipset, neither use the IDE bus.

I've also read somewhere that the reason of the crackling was that the data-buffer on the live! was too small, and when the data couldn't reach the live in time it produces a audible 'crack'. And that this also was the reason why the Live! was 'hijacking' the PCI bus, i.e. to minimize the crackling.

Though I'm not too sure if this is true, since if it would be, you would expect them to use a bigger buffer on the audigy (though you never know with CL ).