Creative Audigy Soundcard

[Sciascia]

That is interesting, it sounded pretty good, no cracks or poppoing when it was assigned to IRQ 5, but when I switched PCI slots and it went to IRQ 10, I got crackling everytime that the HD accessed. I didn't worry about it too much since by that point I had decided to get rid of it.

I don't have anything on the 2nd IDE controller right now, since my CD burner is off to be repaired. My video capture is done with the FT100, which did not produce any interference.

I found the Santa Cruz online for $68 at Erwin computers. They are the same company that I bought my G400 from years ago, very good prices/service and they ship to APO addresses. If I can't scrounge one up locally Monday, I'll probably go ahead and order from them.

Doc, what drivers are you using with yours? I just read some posts about the new drivers for Win2k causing proiblems, but from what I could tell, these particular people don't seem to computer literate (nicest way I could say it). Very rude to eachother as well.

Also, is there an option for "record what you hear"? Pretty much whatever inputs are enabled the record mixer will record. This is something that would be nice, so that I don't have to switch between mic and line for the wife.

[Indiana]

Another thing about the Audigy: apparently it has only slightly better soundquality than the crappy SBLive.

The well-respected german Hifi magazine Stereoplay has tested the Audigy and it's performance is rather mediocre. Hardly 90dB weighted SNR (not >100 as Creative claims) and a bad drop on the frequency-band in the >18KHz area.

[Technoid]

My Nle machine is based on a MSI 6337 (I815E)

Has a 128 PC133 333 appacer sdram stick (dont reliable with 222's get's "funky" , It's not that it chraches or so it just feel "wrong")

age old 2,4 GB fujitsu udma 33 boot drive and a Sony 52x cdrom on primary IDE.

One 60 GB IBM DTLA on the secondary ide.

Matrox G200 16M sdram (The G400 never worked reliable with the RRG)

Matrox RRG

3Com Nic.

SBLive 4637?? (old one, thicker chip and less pins than on a "modern" 4830)

Needs to be done:

Newer/faster bootdrive, more ram!!,

[Dr Mordrid]

IF someone is having problems with the new Win2K/XP Santa Cruz drivers they have something else going on.

I have those new certified drivers in 8 systems now and no problems at all. This covers 7 BX and 1 VIA based Athlon system.

Dr. Mordrid

[Duty]

I am in the final stages of installing XP. I just started the install program for the Audigy. I am not sure if it is going to work, but after it is done I'll post the result.

Wish me luck...

Jeff

[Duty]

It works... mostly. Well the noise mentioned above is there, but seeing that the drivers are not designed for XP I'm happy. The firewire works so far as well. I'll test everything tonight after I finish installing my new hardware. I ordered 2 40Gb (7200rpm IBM love) drives and a promise ATA 100 card. After I get the raid 0 setup I'll do some capturing.

As for the Audigy, I am going to wait and see if the upcomming drivers (to be released larter this month) will remove the noise. Over all I am happy with the Audigy.

Realisticly I can't complain to much about driver issues. If drivers where enough to drop a product I would never have purchesed a G400DH (the G200 left a bad tast in my mouth) and/or I would not be using it any more ( it is in my student computer ).


Jeff

[Duty]

Ok, I finally got the capture to work. For your reference the problems had nothing to do with the sound card. It took so long because of a bad hard drive. One of the new 41Gb IBM drives died killing the stripe and disabling the Promise ATA 100 card. I replaced the drive and now all is fine. I captured 30 min 31 sec and dropped 3 frames. There is no sound distortion or popping. Everything works fine. In case it matters, I did the capture using the 30-day trial of Premiere 6, the standard windows firewire driver and the firewire port on the Audigy.

To say the least, this was a suprise. I am using the Win2k drivers for the Audigy and XP is so new, I was expecting problems. But there were none. I have read many posts about the noise problems and wonder, why is it happing to others and not to me? Well in Win2k I did hear the noise, but in XP I don't. Take that for whatever it is worth.

Lastly a note about XP, I as surprised to find the level of driver support already in place. I needed only one driver to get up and running and that was for the Audigy. No via drivers, no video drivers, no ATA 100 drivers, this was the first time I have ever installed a new OS from MS with out problems. 95, 98, NT4 and 2000 all had massive driver problems at the start. In the case of 95 it required me to upgrade both hardware and software.

Ok, that covers my Audigy experience. Uneventful install and use, which is what I want in my hardware. I must say it is nice to see hardware the works so well you kind of forget it is there.

Later all,

Jeff

[Dr Mordrid]

There might be a problem with one of the Audigy's bundled programs. Here's a quote I ran across in my betaing;

"Just a note about Playcenter. It seems that this programme is causing a lot of of different problems for many people. A search at the Creative Jukebox forum;

http://www.creativejukebox.com/jukebox/user/bboard/welcome.asp

will show just how bad this is. I'm on a beta programme for some third party applications for the Jukebox and the problems go away once the creative software has been removed and replaced with alternatives. I don't think that the problem lies with the (device deleted). Also, I don't think that the Playcenter is a particularly good MP3 encoder. You should try either Lame or Blade - both are freeware - which are much better. "

FWIW

Dr. Mordrid

[Sciascia]

Duty

It looks like you are cpturing with firewire and not with a Matrox video card (analog). This would probably be the reason that it works for you. I am sure that WinXP has better driver support from the box since it is the latest (nwest drivers included) so it is noce to hear that it works well. The problem that I had was that I already have some PCI resource intensive cards, G400 V, FT100 and a couple of other cards taht help to add up. If you are capturing through the built in firewire of a card that already has a bunch of the resources reserved for it, I bet tht it would work very well.

Sounds like in your case that it is a good thing!