Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Sound Card | List Price: $129.99
Discount Price: $37.99
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Brand: Creative Labs
Binding: Electronics
Features: - The only PC solution to enable the Advanced Resolution era of 24-bit music fidelity with 192 kHz in stereo and 96 kHz in 5.1
- The best Sound Blaster clarity ever, rivaling home-theater audio quality for music, games, and movies
- Experience superior multi-channel audio from MP3s, CDs, 3-D games, and Dolby Digital EX movies with a rear center speaker
- The most exciting features yet with library search, automatic playlist volume matching, and hiss removal for MP3s
- Pure recording path captures the quality and subtle details of your audio creations
No input [Posted on 2004-09-02]
I had this card installed in my Dell when I ordered it and I will say it does sound great BUT there is one proplem with it that I need and that is the input will not work. I called Creative Labs, Dell and got no where. Now maybe not many people need to use the input jack but it is a must for me. My old computer had a simple card but it did work. So if you want just great sound, this card is good but if you need to record albums, etc. then forget it, this card won't do it, or at least mine won't.
Software was written by gibbon monkeys. [Posted on 2005-11-29]
I have had this card for 2 years now and it has worked fine for me as long as I didn't play with Creative's drivers or software.
All of a sudden, sound quit coming out of my rear speakers ONLY in certain Creative applications, and the speaker calibrator quit putting out any sound. So I uninstalled the drivers and tried to reinstall them.
Be aware that -
1. Creative will NEVER offer a driver pack on its webpage. You MUST, I repeat MUST start with your original CD to load some drivers, and then you can get Creative's patches from their webpage. Now that my CD is 2 years old, there appears to be a conflict with *its* drivers and creative's patches. Apparently not enough bananas were bought for the gibbons, and they wandered out to the jungle in search of nourishment before finishing a full driver package.
2. There is a good chance that once you go to reinstall your drivers, you will get a "Hardware not found" message (see Creative's tech support forum) and not be able to install the drivers. Want another banana, Creative programmer? OOO OOO OO AHH AHHH AHHH!
My card is now a steaming pile of $100 poo since their driver system is not working for me.
Wish I had my old Turtle Beach Santa Cruz back.
Frustrating [Posted on 2006-05-05]
Alright...when I can actually get this darn thing to work right it is an EXCELLENT sound card..But over the past few years I've had this thing I have had to reinstall the drives numerous times....I mean...much more than I should have to...This program will only function right for me for about a few months before I have to reinstall it again. I have updated my drivers and I'm sure nothing is wrong with my hard drive, still get the same problem...suddenly something stops working right, this time it was the fact that I can only choose 4.1 speakers..not even headphones or anything else...I dont even have 4.1 speakers....I have 6.1...Last time I couldn't change the EAX settings from default, so everything sounded horrible, the time before that I couldn't even open the EAX console period, mostly it's just problems with their EAX software. Which if you dont use everything sounds much worse by the way. If you can look past that problem though....great sound card...creative just needs to learn how to program decent software, cause the drivers for this sound card are absolutely horrid.
Hardware is exceptional; drivers are abysmal. [Posted on 2006-12-30]
I use a couple of Audigy 2ZS in my recording business. No other soundcard on the market, then or now, offers the flexibility and just great sound capturing capabilities of this card. Interestingly, all the later Creative products no longer support 192k/24 bit sampling, so this card is truly unique. The only other manufactured card supporting this brilliant sampling clarity costs US$250 more!
If you only get a hold of one of these cards to see how good audio CAN be on your computer, do it. It's jaw-droppingly good.
But I have to reinforce the driver problems described by others. I have dealt directly with the driver team at CL, and to say they are unhelpful is an understatement. Early drivers (e.g. those shipped on the CD) had some pretty bad flaws, but at least they allowed the card to work to its full potential (which is really astonishingly good!).
All the latest drivers (since late 2005) use the Creative "universal" driver model, which means they are designed to work correctly ONLY with the newer, low market level CL cards. All the new drivers have significant bugs and "showstopper" flaws, and completely prevent the card from being used properly (i.e. nowhere near it's actual technical specifications). Then there's a whole other discussion about CL supporting more than one card in any computer system. Old drivers worked beautifully with multiple cards, but new drivers just lock out inputs and confuse mixer settings and just don't work, full stop.
So if you want one of the clearest, most flexible, highest sample rate cards ever on the PC market up to this year, get one of these if you can (I've bought 3 spare cards in case any of my current ones die, as CL no longer support the product at all). Just don't expect the latest "mass market", "cloth-eared consumer" Creative labs drivers to work properly, and don't expect CL to help you with any technical problems. Ever.
To be honest, my next card will be anything BUT a Creative Labs product. But for me, the Audigy 2ZS is the BMW of the older audio card market. Have a drive, if you can. You just probably wouldn't want to own one.
Worked, Happy and Now with the Music [Posted on 2008-04-07]
Everything in life should be this simple.
If you want a basic card for your basic sound look no further. I'm not going to bother you with detailed tripe because I really can't hear the difference and if you are playing 128 mp3s you won't ether.
We plugged it in, loaded the software and she ran from the get go. Darn happy and come to think of it we have never had a Creative Lap product that we had to shoot.
One thing, see if you can buy one used. Save some money folks.
Good luck and don't forget as Red Green says, "if the women don't find you handsome they should at least find you handy".
Mike
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