3DsoundSurge Review: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro


	Victoria Brooks and Christopher Ambrose put Creative's Audigy 4 Pro to the test

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Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro

by Victoria Brooks and Christopher Ambrose

Edited by Mark Muschett

Last updated January 6, 2005

Introduction:

The history of the Sound Blaster series of cards has been one of devoted love and loathing. In the beginning, they were vanguards, pushing the capabilities of what to expect from a PC soundcard, with the SB16, culminating with the AWE64 Gold.

Through the late 90’s PC gaming fans were treated to some serious advances in audio, much of it driven by the often-cutthroat competition between Aureal (pushing their wavetracing technology that debuted in A3D 2.0 on Vortex 2 driven cards) and Creative Labs, pushing their EAX technology that debuted on the Live.

Today we are faced with a market where Aureal is no more, Sensaura has been purchased by Creative, and Creative’s success in getting developer support for EAX Advanced HD has made choosing a sound card from a pure gaming perspective an easy decision.

Now, not everyone is looking to make their sound card decisions on just one element and even from a gaming perspective. NVIDIA was making things interesting with their SoundStorm solution offering single cable digital multichannel gaming for the first time (via real time Dolby Digital encoding aka Dolby Digital Live).

Still, the problem for anyone but the pure gamer has been the compromises that choosing one card forced.

If you went with Creative Labs, and their Audigy series, you got today's standard in gaming due to wide scale adoption of EAX Advanced HD in current game titles, a host of unique hardware driven DSP features, strong MIDI support, and the only PC product offering DVD-Audio support.

Unfortunately, despite strong claims from Creative to the contrary, you also got sound reproduction, particularly for the very important (all CD and hence MP3 tracks) 16/44 kHz source material that was not up to the same standard as competitors using chips from Cirrus Logic (e.g. Santa Cruz) and more recently, VIA (a host of ENVY24 based products).

Those products have been able to post superior pure audio quality across product generations but have always been behind when it comes to support of any particular version of EAX. This difference was accentuated even further with the release of EAX Advanced HD, which can only be fully implemented on Creative’s Audigy line.

EMU (a Creative subsidiary) has been music orientated designs for recording and playback (back since the days of the Live!), and showed that the basis for the Audigys can sound good. But these cards lacked the basic consumer needs for gaming support, so these were relegated to a niche group of PC audiophiles and professional recorders. The bottom line is that if you were a die-hard music aficionado first and a gamer second, then you probably made your sacrifices on the gaming side and looked elsewhere, much to the chagrin of Creative Labs.

Now with the advent of PCI-E, the PCI line of cards are being slowly phased out, and like the AWE64 Gold of the past, Creative Labs decided to make one last PCI card, to be a transition from what was, and what is coming. Enter the Audigy 4 Pro. Take the best from the PCI pro music card, and add the best gaming support that their cards are known for, and you have the premier all-in-one consumer offering for PCI.

In my opinion, the Audigy 4 Pro was something long overdue, as you will see in this review.

Technical Overview --->