3DsoundSurge Review: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy


	Mikael Hagén put Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy to the test

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Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy

Mikael Hagén - Last updated September 9, 2001

Software Bundle:

Users of Creative Labs soundcards will find themselves in a familiar place when they check out the Creative Labs designed software that’s bundled with the card. You will find the PlayCenter (now 3.0), Oozic, Creative MiniDisc center, Keyboard, Creative WaveStudio, Creative Recorder and Vienna SoundFont Studio in addition to the various configuration tools (Surround mixer, Device Controls, SoundFont, Speaker, Task Bar, EAX Control Panel, Diagnostics and Restore defaults) and demos (SoundFont Showcase, SB Audigy Experience, SB Audigy Quick Start and EAX Gold Mine.

The most interesting of what I mentioned are in my opinion clearly PlayCenter 3.0, the Surround Mixer and EAX Gold Mine. I will here just briefly go through the PlayCenter 3.0 and some of the configuration tools and wait for the full review before giving a description of the others. EAX Gold Mine will be covered in the games section below

PlayCenter 3.0

The PlayCenter 3.0 is where you can play, record and organize your music. This includes fast and high quality MP3/WMA recording and you can now also burn your own CDs. The major advantage compared to using other players which also offer playback, recording and organizing is easy access to using the Audigy’s EAX Advanced HD effects. These effects are Environmental Audio (reverb), equalizer, time scaling, DREAM, Audio Clean up and some other advanced effects like converting male to female voice. I will cover these in more detail in the music section.

I had some stability issues with PlayCenter in the past, especially in Windows2000, but I’m pleased to report I didn’t experience any problems with PlayCenter 3.0.

Configuration

As mentioned, the Configuration tools you have are Surround mixer, Device Controls, SoundFont, Speaker, Task Bar, EAX Control Panel, Diagnostics and Restore defaults. The latter two are just what it sounds like and are useful if you run into problems.

EAX Control Panel

The EAX Control Panel is where you can choose to apply some of the Environmental Effects and in detail configure them. The basic options are just to select an effect and then the strength of the original sound and the effect (this is now done in dB instead of percentage as with the Live cards). After that you can select if you want the original sound / reverb ratio to be different on some sources (e.g. wave/mp3, microphone, line-in, digital-CD, analog mix, SPDIF in). If you select default reverb effect and then reduce the reverb effect for wave/mp3 before you start a game the reverb levels through out the game will be lower. This can be very useful if you find the reverb effects too loud. Creative has also created reverb presets that do just this.

More advanced users can choose to control the details of the reverb parameters. You have 30 options including but not limited to RoomHF, Decay Time, High Frequency Decay Ratio, Early Reflections Level, Reflections Delay, Reverb Delay, Reverb Pan Divergence and Size. You can then save the effect.

If you own a Live nothing of what I so far has said about the EAX Control Panel should be news to you since the Live cards offer the same feature set. Having said that there are some changes. One minor one is that 3 new parameters have been added, the Room LF, Low Frequency Cutoff and Low Frequency Ratio. A slightly more interesting change is that the effects are now sorted under FX, ENV, EQ and Custom. Under Custom you find the effects you created. ENV (probably short for Environments) is where you find 15 environments (e.g. Ball Park, Church, Concert hall) that Creative has created. Under FX you find more customized effects like EAX lite/disabled/normal effects, Guitar Flanger, Music - Normalizer, Voice Male To Female and about another 30.

Live users will be surprised to find a lot less presets than they have been used to, including the removal of all game presets (for non EAX games). One reason may be the complaints of the huge register space the previous wide range of presets took, another may be to only display effects that may be nice to add to music. In case of games it may just come down to more games use EAX now, where as when the Live was launched offering EAX presets was a way for gamers to immediately get some benefit of their purchase with its current collection of games. Now if you miss some of the old Environmental Audio presets you just click on the reverb effect and get to the advanced mode where you can select between over 70 Environments without any need for having to configure the 30 different reverb parameters.

Another change when it comes to presets is they are no longer tied to a specific speaker configuration, again I guess related to the register space complaints. Personally I had no issues with that but I found it quite messy with different presets depending on speaker configuration. This cleaner interface is in particular noticeable when using the Creative Taskbar but before we discuss that we need to check out the "new" EQ effects.

I put new in quotes since an unofficial patch (only works with some drivers, see our utilities page for details) has been available to enable it for Live cards. The Equalizer on the Audigy is a Parametric one. In general, a parametric equalizer allows you to specify the center frequency for the boost/cut and the bandwidth - how wide a frequency range it affects. If you own the Nomad Jukebox you should be familiar with the concept. In case of the Audigy Creative has created 15 presets you can use or you can create your own by adjusting the Low Gain and Cutoff, Mid Gain/Center/Width 1 and 2, and High Gain and Cutoff. Unlike the other effects the equalizer seems to have no effect if you start a game that uses 3D sound.

I'm a bit surprised that Creative doesn't offer the new MultiEnvironment feature in the control panel but perhaps a driver upgrade will add that functionality.

Creative Task Bar

Now getting back to the Creative TaskBar that is located on the top part of the screen. Live users familiar with the Creative Launcher will see it changed quite a bit, offering a much cleaner interface and removed everything except what Live users know as Live Task. For users not familiar with Live!Task it's just an easy way to select between the various presets and starting the application you want. What you do is simply select what you want to do (e.g. Listen to Music, Play Guitar, Play Games, Watch Movies, Talk Into Microphone) and you then get a suggestion of a preset to select. In case of suggesting to play game you can select between normal EAX effect, lite and disabled. If you select to listen to music it launched PlayCenter 3 and you can then select between 3 environments (e.g. Concert Hall), 4 EQ presets (e.g. Rock) and 3 special effect (Normalizer, Male to Female). You can create your own tasks if you wish. For example add playing Quake3 with your own created EAX preset.

As a side note I can add I had no stability issues with the Creative Taskbar, unlike the Creative Launcher which frequently crashed for me in Windows 2000.

SoundFont

This is the app you use to configure what soundfont bank to use and some configuration options. The major new bit compared to the Live is you can load as large SoundFonts your system ram allows (Live was limited to 32MB).

Device Controls

Here you can select the Digital output sample rate (44.1, 48 or 96 kHz) and in case you got the Audigy drive enable SPDIF bypass. The option Live users with Live!Drive have if the headphone output jack should disable the other outputs is as previously mentioned not available. The option to select the number of wave files that can be played simulatationously present in the Live Win9x/ME drivers are no longer available. You can of course still play several simulatationously but have not checked if it's now defaults to the maximum option of 32 or the 4 that was default before.

Surround Mixer and Speaker

Moving on to the more standard type of configuration options other soundcard companies also offer you find the combined speaker/surround mixer applet. It can be accessed by left clicking the Audigy logo in the system tray or from the AudioHQ (can also be placed in the system tray). As a side not if you left click on the Audigy icon you can select one of your favourite presets.

Live users will find right at home in the surround mixer. As you can see from the image it’s quite similar but got a face lift. Here you find the volume control for line-in, MIDI, CD audio, Aux, TAD, PC Speaker, Microphone, Digital CD audio, SPDIF in, master volume and if you got the Audigy Drive also Aux In 2 and Line In-2/Microphone In-2. You can also adjust the treble and bass of the playback. The red across above the master volume control you see in the image is used to enable digital output only. So far no news compared to the Live but when you check the recording options you will in addition to the standard SPDIF in, Digital CD-in, What you hear and Microphone find a setting called analog mix instead of individual inputs for Line-In, Aux, CD audio, TAD and PC speaker. This allow you to record a mix of the analog sources as mentioned in the in/out section. If you select “What You Hear” you can now also enable recording of multiple analog sources, an option previously (with the Live cards) only available if you selected Digital output only.

Another new feature in the surround mixer is the new combined front-rear and left-right fader/balance control. Moving up to the Speaker part of the surround mixer you find the usual options of headphones, 2, 4 and 5.1 speaker as well as a test button for it. What is missing is the Live!Surround mode that allowed the Live to take advantage of the surround channels for Dolby Prologic/Dolby Digital systems that only had no separate rear input. It was just mono but still better than just stereo in my opinion, but it seems like Creative Labs disagrees. Perhaps its removal is related to the new improved 3D audio engine or just that the Live!Surround option confused users.

If you click the settings button you will find the center/subwoofer control, bass redirect and enable/disable AC3 decode. The option to disable AC3 decode is required if you want to use an external decoder. Bass redirect refer to sending bass frequencies from all channels to the subwoofer output, a feature already available in the Live as many other card. A new unique feature to the Audigy is that you can now select where the crossover should be, that is what frequencies should be sent to the subwoofer and what should be sent to the satellites. We will cover this in more detail in the DVD section.

Under the EAX tab you find another place you can select between the various EAX Advanced HD effects, which we covered in the EAX Control Panel section above. If you click the settings button the EAX Control Panel is launched.

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