Hi,

I play a lot of music, have a large MP3 collection and want to get the best sound out of my PC.

Which one should i get, a Soundblaster Extigy, i like the idea and they look cool.

Or an Audigy 2??

Thanks

Oh unless i can afford a Audigy 2 Platinum EX then all my problems are solved

Hi,

Whatever you do, may I recommend you to avoid the Audigy1 by all costs..

There's a known electrical problem on the board that makes it kill itself after a few weeks, on about 40% of recent motherboards (yes, it did happen to myself too).

Between Audigy2 and Extigy I don't know, but in your research maybe you might want to take non-creative cards (Teerratec etc) into account, too

Cheers

Just the name "extigy" -- sounds like it was cooked up by a marketing guru, extrapolating from the words "external" and "audigy" -- ugggghhhh...

Check out the M-Audio and/or Terratec cards... the SB's may sound "ok" but you're paying for marketing, not sound quality.

is this really true? where can i find more information about this problem?
i have an audigy and it's been running now for over a year and i had no such problems, but it interests me now.

-andy-

I have an Audigy 1 for more than a year too and so far so good. Motherboard used is MSI KT266Pro2-RU.


CraigiPod:
I would suggest u go for Audigy 2.

Most people here don't recommend Creative cards (except for the infamous es1371), since they are geared towards gaming usage rather than serious music listening/creation/editing/etc. The consumer level card, which gets recommended the most is the M-Audio Revolution, which is about as expensive as the Audigy2 and provides much better performance in everything but gaming.

Ok, first read professional reviews of the modern cards:

M-Audio Revolution
&
Audigy 2
&
check daily since traslation of the Terratec Aureon Space should be available any moment now (original article in russian was published recently).

After you have read all articles, select either since I bet you will never be able to tell the difference on speakers costing <$500US. I decided to go Audigy 2 Platinum way just because I wanted to have convenient front panel headphone connector and dynamic mic jack for karaoke things + "free" FireWire. After reading review of Terratec Aureon Space, I may say I would have thought about my selection again, and the choice for card would be Terratec this time. However considering poor quality of sound in games, which I may play accasionally, I'm super happy with my Audigy 2 choice now. In addition, using 44.1->48 resampling in either foobar or winamp, I think removes any difference in sound quality of the cards completely.

Enjoy.

Sure, it is. If you had no problems for 1 year, you probably are safe though.

From this link:


This problem happened when I put my Audigy1 into a new computer. Since I put it there, the card has been seen only as a "Creative Game Port". I found a great article in russian at the time, which explained the problem in details, and how to solve it. Based on this info, with an electronician friend we unsoldered the EEPROM chip, reprogrammed it with correct Audigy SB0090 contents and soldered it back. My Audigy1 card now works again. That was 4 months ago.

It was the PCI DEVICE_ID that got scrambled. It seems only some of the newer ACPI mainboard can trigger that - but there are A LOT of them now ! BTW disabling ACPI in BIOS doesn't prevent the trouble.

By the way: the problem is certainly more widespread than stated in the linked page, because there's no need for an "old network card" to trigger the problem (the LAN was onboard in that PC).

Cheers

Note that the extinctgy will have a lower SNR, because audio goes down the USB in ADPCM form.

I would definitely recommend avoiding Creative. If I was shopping for a new soundcard one of my first choices would a Hercules - I would have to buy another model with a external box on the desktop as I have used the one on my Game Theatre XP constantly the past two years.
edit: gaming sounds wonderful on my card too, and I have tried with various RTS and FPS titles and a decent speaker setup

Look for a non-resampling soundcard with an envy24 chipset or similar ... important to me was that my soundcard was able to sync to external digital sources without internal resampling so i went for an ewx 24/96 ...

Terratec 's range of Aureon soundcards based on the envy24 chipset promise great value for money ratio IMO

I think i'm going to go for M-Audio Revolution 7.1

You think thats the best choice??

If you're going for a non-resampling/sound quality oriented card, it's hard to beat for the price. I have had one myself since the card started shipping and have been quite happy with it.

One note on the Extigy and other external USB soundcards including M-Audio's:

I've looked at these for a laptop with noisy line-out, and for every brand and model I've found reviews mentioning in passing that the sound stalls / stutters now and then because of the USB connection. One review of M-Audio's mentioned that M-Audio would look into adding buffering but as far as I know it is not present in their current USB device.