Sun Oct 28 04:29:50 2001

I just sold my soul. To satan, master of all that is evil.

Creative Labs.

I just purchased an Audigy, went to the store for a Acoustic Edge, saw an audigy for the same price. Researched in my memory on reviews, saw it had a ieee1394, purchased.

Came home, cleansed myself in the shower, and now am installing it in my box, installing XP and drivers.

Pray for me.

Sun Oct 28 05:50:08 2001

Sun Oct 28 08:19:09 2001

I dont think I will ever buy a new sound card from Creative Labs. Creative doesnt seem to focus on sound quality much. It's like how nVidia cards (heh, and now ATI) seem to sacrifice image quality and push new features and buzzwords.

Except to me, sound quality is more important than video. I'm a freak like that.

Sun Oct 28 08:31:45 2001

So, here's hoping for the best.

Sun Oct 28 12:08:38 2001

That's why I've bought a Fortissimo II.

Sun Oct 28 12:51:21 2001

But the acid test - was it cheap? And does it sound funkeh?

Sun Oct 28 12:52:07 2001

Audigy is a silly name.

Agreed.

Sun Oct 28 18:42:54 2001

Drivers? They work, no apparent problems in XP, a tad confusing for driver install, shows no XP compatibility on the box, but the drivers I downloaded wanted me to install the drivers from the CD, which I was a bit hesitant to do, but after installing the download patch, everything worked well. As far as the pci bus issue that the earlier Live cards have, I'm not sure, but then again, I don't have a VIA chipset. I'll have to do some CD burns later on.

Yes, not to terribly bad. I'm starting to feel not quite so filthy. :)

Riso: Isn't the fortissmo II the same chip used in the GTXP? If so, I bought the GTXP this spring, and returned it for huge driver suckiness. But from what I hear, their drivers have now improved quite a bit.

Well, here goes a large CD burn from my IDE 1 to IDE 2. MP3 playback is going from slave on IDE2, burn is from HD master IDE 1 to master IDE2, on large files. Will do a single large file test when this is completed. Had sound cut out once during the burn, but I think that was a buffer underun as the slave couldn't keep up the input during the buffer.

More info later.

Oh yea, Audigy is a bad name, but they could have come up with something worse I suppose.

Sun Oct 28 19:22:59 2001

Riso: Isn't the fortissmo II the same chip used in the GTXP? If so, I bought the GTXP this spring, and returned it for huge driver suckiness. But from what I hear, their drivers have now improved quite a bit.

No.

GTXP uses the CS4630, while the Fort2 uses the CS4624

Sun Oct 28 19:47:42 2001

It's like how nVidia cards (heh, and now ATI) seem to sacrifice image quality and push new features and buzzwords.

Except Nvidia's 3d quality is second to none.  ATI has been dumbing down 3d quality and specially optomizing for one game.

2d quality has a lot to do with filter quality on non-VLSI circuits (actually, I saw an article awhile ago on where you could "upgrade" certain doodads on an MX to where 2d quality would improve.  Obviously, this would require a soldering iron)

The card itself computes in an all digital format, then a RAMDAC converts the datastream to an analog format and passes along this analog stream to the monitor.

2d quality probably has something to do with how the Ramdac interperets the digital datastream as well as far as saturation, hue, purity, etc is concerned, I guess.

Alot of this 2d problem should improve as the industry moves to a digital signal format to the displays.

Sun Oct 28 20:22:12 2001

Except Nvidia's 3d quality is second to none

What crack are you smoking? (especially w/o me!)

nvidias 3d quality is NOT top notch.

Radeon+Kyro II have a much better looking 32bit mode for one.

And then we still have that nice banding/16bit S3TC bug.

Sun Oct 28 20:50:50 2001

from Riso posted at 2:22 pm on Oct. 28, 2001

Except Nvidia's 3d quality is second to none

What crack are you smoking? (especially w/o me!)

nvidias 3d quality is NOT top notch.

Radeon+Kyro II have a much better looking 32bit mode for one.

And then we still have that nice banding/16bit S3TC bug.

Oh contraire monfraire.  :tongue: ATI's 16 bit is horrid by all reports, Kyro is decent, but has some artifacting problems.

Then of course ATI pulls down 3d quality automatically just to maintain frame rate.

Sun Oct 28 20:52:16 2001

The noisey ramdac that affects 2d affects 3d as well, but its not as noticeable when playing a fast-paced game. As for rendering quality, yeah its good but so are most modern 3d cards, since its a matter of digital computations. The exceptions would be that texture issue that nVidia had (i forget what that was all about) and the new issue with the ATI 8500 in Q3, which is a driver thing anyway.

I think the problem here is that the majority of the computing world is the type that leaves their monitor refresh rate at 60hz and listen to 128kbps MP3s on their Altec Lansing system and think they sound good.

People buy the vid card with the fastest frame-rate and the sound card that CL's newest recycle of the same technology. The videophiles and audiophiles are forgotten.

Sun Oct 28 20:57:48 2001

What exactally do you mean by "3d quality?"

Anyhing like driver issues like artifacting, to hardware limitations like texture sizes supported to just general look and color purity.

If Nvidial doesn't lead the consumer market in this, well thats news to me.

Sun Oct 28 21:08:21 2001

Kyro 2 worked great in 32 bit, with 2000.
Drivers are all fucked up with 98, and, since that's my gaming platform, it's back to the Voodoo5500.

Acoustic Edge cards are very nice, but, driver installs suck.

Is it just me, or does it seem like an awful lot of "new"
crap is coming out, and it's just that, crap?

Not to mention everyone scrambling to write drivers for XP,
2000 is just now getting drivers that work, Mac OS X.1, and,
Linux Redhat 7.2 just came out.

Sometimes change can be nothing more then marketing shit, with no real reason behind it.

Socrates

Sun Oct 28 22:31:43 2001

Sometimes change can be nothing more then marketing shit, with no real reason behind it.

Congratulations!

You just described crapidia's 6-month product cycle.

Mon Oct 29 23:45:16 2001

They would release a bunch of the same balls, with small cosmetic changes, at very short intervals.

The "it's the ball that makes me score" group would run out and buy this weeks miracle ball.

The stores ended up with so much old stock, that they couldn't sell, that it drove many of them out of business.

A couple shops now do it by catalog.  Look at the book, pay ahead, and we ship.

Computer companies could well do that to retail outlets.

Makes it a hard business to compete in.

gs

Tue Oct 30 03:56:18 2001

I can't believe it.

I like the damn thing! It sounds nice, EAX2.0 is OK, not as good as A3d IMHO, but it does a relatively decent job of it. The 4 channel output is very nice. I don't (now) notice any sound degradation that I expected. It's stable, I can play multiple streams no problem whatsoever. Mp3's in quake ( yes, I that's correct, well, GLQuake to be exact ) work great.

What can I say, it's a nice soundcard, has good playback, no problems ( so far ).

I give it a B, mainly cause it didn't make me go 'holy shit!' like my vortex2 did. But, that was over 2.5 years ago as well.

---Edit ----

Duffman: I'm not looking for AudioPhile quality in my computer, especially for 99.00 bucks. For any music 'experience' I want, I'll use my home stereo. This don't sound to bad to kill some zombies however. :)

(Edited by DeAthe at 8:00 pm on Oct. 29, 2001)

Tue Oct 30 20:17:22 2001

I can play multiple streams no problem whatsoever

This is nothing to be proud of. Honestly.

Wed Oct 31 02:50:00 2001

I'm not *proud* persay, just happy about it.