 |
I'm a musician: pianist/keyboardist, guitarist, and bassist. And I needed a sound card that could process sounds at a better rate than a 50 or 80 millisecond buffer with onboard sound from my motherboard. Sufficed to say, this sound card has, and continues to meet that need. It has been able to lower my buffer requirements down to 2 ms (pretty much real-time playback) at times, which is just phenomenal! My first card finally expired after 6 years of fairly heavy use with my previous 5970, and currently high-end 6970s crossfire GPUs blasting heat on it and heavy sound processing on more complex, synth oriented compositions. I purchased my first Audigy 2 ZS Platinum card back in 2006, and even today, it is very hard to find a card with the same wholesome features and quality this sound device possesses. There are no cards on the market that have an optional 5.25 bay (CD/DVD drive) facing that has a multitude of input and output 1/4 inch sized TRS jacks, RCA, firewire, 5-pin midi, and digital connectors. Not to mention the built in remote IR sensor for a near entertainment center experience. However, much like most products on the market, the Audigy 2 ZS does use quite a bit of proprietary components by design. The front side output for headphones and/or a microphone require that you own the 5.25 bay and its special ribbon cable to connect to it. It would have been nice if they would have included a pin out for those who may not have been as lucky as to own the optional bay device. Additionally, though I'm not entirely sure about this, but I believe the rear connectors for 7.1 surround sound accommodate their Creative 7.1 surround sound speaker system. Again, I'm not entirely sure. Do your research in this regard for any preexisting surround sound setups before purchasing any sound card. Outside of this, my only other gripe would have been Creative's decision to use a firewire port instead of a USB port on both the sound card and its optional front bay device. Seems like a waste for such an under used technology. All those minor discrepancies aside, this is a fantastic card! And I'll be the first one to buy a 2nd generation of it should they deliver!Read full review
I bought this card to use for a home audio project. I use the "kx_project" which is an open-source driver for the Audigy family boards that allows the user full control over the internal routing and the DSP. Audigy is an old technology but for my purposes the used Audigy 2 + the free kx_project driver give me more control than the far superior EMU, RME and M-Audio boards that sell for $400+. Audigy is a 24bit card but 99% of music is encoded in 16bit. However there are smart software decoders out there that would read the 16bit data and try to up-convert it to 24bit. Check your preferred audio/video player to see if they have such capabilities. Foobar2000 has an option to do that and there's an input plug-in for Winamp. Also if you are using Foobar2000 you can resample to 48000 in the DSP section since this the default Audigy 2 rate. The Audigy family are not great for recording (at sample rates 48k) due to resampling issues. The X-Fi technology on newer Creative boards resamples the signal correctly and they use the Crystalizer technology to upconvert to 24bit. (wikipedia) I was particularly interested in the 7.1 support. Note that you will need special cables (4ch 3.5mm to 4 RCA) to access the channels from 2 of the output jacks. There are Audigy 2 boards floating on eBay for cheaper that are NOT "ZS". I have searched and found nothing on the topic so I don't know what the difference is. I also own an X-Fi card and in my opinion when configured correctly the software upconverters in Winamp and Foobar2000 sound better (on a 24bit card) than the Crystalizer and the other X-Fi DSP features. Unrelated, but don't play music in Media Player or iTunes, that's a waste!!Read full review
I bought this sound card to solve the latency issue that software synths in a virtual studio environment. In layman's terms, when a key on the synth was struck the sound was coming out as late as 50 ms. later. In addition there were many pops and crackles in the sound. I installed the card and, like magic the pops and crackles disappeared and my latency dropped to 2 ms. which is undetectable. The surprise was the sound. I was replacing an onboard VIA hi-def sound card. The Audigy was noticably more clear and a bit louder to boot not only for the synths, but also much better in quality when I played MP3s on that computer. Whether your needs are professional like mine, or you just want a card that plays your music the way you want to hear it, and you don't want to spend a ton of money, this is the card for you.Read full review
I was looking for a sound card for my IBM eServer xSeries 235 running Windows Server 2003. I only had one free PCI-X slot so I wasn't so sure it would fit my requirements. The SB Audigy 2ZS had all the inputs and outputs I needed, plus the SNR is excellent for a legacy card. I popped it in, and update the drivers from Creative's website. That was it! It works perfectly - nuff said!
Beware, the DELL Audigy 2ZS has three stickers on the back and is more difficult to install. There are some other slight variances as well. This isn't too much trouble under XP, but under Windows 98 it is a pain. Look up the VOGONS page on the dell audigy 2 zs for more info.
Verified purchase: Yes
Current slide {CURRENT_SLIDE} of {TOTAL_SLIDES}- Best Selling in Sound Cards (Internal)
Current slide {CURRENT_SLIDE} of {TOTAL_SLIDES}- Save on Sound Cards (Internal)
Current slide {CURRENT_SLIDE} of {TOTAL_SLIDES}- You may also like
