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First Audigy 2 review (1 Viewer)

John Parris

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Aug 10, 2002
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235
Well it's good to see the righted some of the wrongs with the new card (ACTUAL 24/96 capability for one thing)... but I'm not seeing a lot of improvement over the audigy for gaming or HTPC use... unless you call 6.1 an improvement... I dont, considering most games dont use Dolby Digital at all (rather EAX or some other format) much less DD EX 6.1...
Personally all I really use a sound card for is a S/PDIF output... as little on-board use as possible... so this really doesnt offer much for me at all. ;)
 

Max Leung

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Sep 6, 2000
Messages
4,611
John, you mean to say that the Audigy 2 STILL CAN'T encode DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 in realtime? It sounds like a repackaged Audigy (which many people charged were simply repackaged Soundblaster Live's). What a load of ****. Well ok that's a little strong...the Audigy 2 is certainly better with sound quality, and it seems from that review that the internal audio conversions are better. But crap, it still resamples 44.1 Khz to 48 Khz?

Dammit, when will NVIDIA put out a seperate DD5.1 realtime-encoding add-on card? I have an Asus A7N-266C motherboard with the NVIDIA nForce chipset (similar to the one used in the xbox), but it is AMD only. I would love to have DD5.1 in games on a Pentium 4 platform...

The DACs on the Audigy 2 seem very nice though.
 

John Parris

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Aug 10, 2002
Messages
235
Max-- yeah, seems nVidia is the only company interested in the real-time dolby digital upmixing... ive never heard one of the boards myself, so I cant make any comments on how well they pull it off, but from other people's comments it seems that a lot of people arent to pleased with the performance...
About standalone cards: don't count on it... Everyone expected nForce2 boards to come in AMD OR P4... but it didnt happen. I dont think nVidia has any interest in supporting Intel boards at this time... plus one of the main selling points of the old and new nForce boards is the integration factor... standalone cards would be just the opposite.
About the Audigy 2 in general: Seems like the Audigy 2 is only what the original Audigy SHOULD have been. There's little difference between the Audigy and Live! series cards, as the Audigy's 24/96 capability was non-existant anyway... the Audigy 2 seems like a more legitimate sucessor, though notably.. useless to me. ;)
 

Max Leung

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Sep 6, 2000
Messages
4,611
Heh. Performance is pretty good with the nforce. However, I (and many other users) am having stability issues with DirectX8.1 games that use 3D audio with the latest nForce drivers. Going back to the May 2002 drivers solves the issue, but the sound quality is only a little better than an Audigy card (ie. not very crisp).

Bah. I predict that the nForce will be dead in a year. But, I really hope the DD5.1 encoding technology will be available as an addon for everyone.
 

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