• Audigy Sb1394 Eax Advanced Hd Driver For Mac Pro

It wasn't long ago that the term 'sound card' meant a simple circuit board and a software driver for generating half-decent audio. How times have changed.

Creative Technology's new Sound Blaster Audigy cards come with a dizzying array of hardware and software add-ons, and have more in common with a home theatre or mini recording studio than with the sound cards of old. I checked out the Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum, the mid-range card in the new Audigy lineup at a suggested price of $319.99 (I was able to find it for less than $250 at retail). A stripped-down version without any of the extra hardware and software sells for around $150, but the extras are well worth the money and I'd definitely save a little longer if necessary to get the Platinum or Platinum EX version.

The card isn't cheap, but you get an awful lot of bang - and boom, jingle, shriek and whistle - for your buck (which accounts for the length of this review.). The Audigy chip needs that number-crunching ability in order to run 'the complex audio algorithms required to produce higher fidelity reverb and effects,' the company says. Like a home-theatre receiver, the Audigy chip can modify the audio to make it sound like you're in one of dozens of different environments, ranging from a concert hall to a cave. The effects are all controlled through a simple point-and-click menu in the card's software.

The card also 'localizes' sound effects such as echoes. If you're playing a game that's compatible with Creative's EAX Advanced HD audio standard (most new games are), for example, and someone is sneaking up behind to your left, that's where you'll hear the footsteps coming from if you have rear speakers or headphones. It's about as close as you can get to really being there without leaving your desk chair. For the techies in the audience, the 32-bit, multi-channel sound card has a set of 24-bit, 96kHz digital-to-analogue converters (DACs) that produce a 100dB signal-to-noise ratio (you can do 96 KHz playback, but not recording).

For the non-techies, this means high-quality sound with deep base, sharp highs and little distortion or hiss. It also means a recording should sound almost identical to the way it did to those recording it, and an 'artificially created' audio environment in a videogame becomes realistic. 5.1 CHANNELS Like any sound card, though, the final audio product still has a lot to do with your speaker system. The Audigy is one of the few audio boards available with outputs for five speakers (a centre channel, two front and two rear speakers) and a subwoofer, a setup commonly referred to in the home theatre market as AC-3 or Dolby Digital.

This 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound is what DVD players generate. Some players don't have a decoder, and instead spit all the channels out over two channels so that your stereo tuner can decode or 'split up' the audio into 5.1 channels or just play it through a plain old two-channel stereo system. The Audigy can do the same thing, producing two-, four-, or 5.1-channels of audio with its built-in Dolby Digital decoding system, but it can also play material stored in the DirectSound, DirectSound3D and Open AL file formats. This means the card works with standard stereo speakers and headphones, but to get the most out of it, you really need at least a four-speaker system with a subwoofer.

With a decent 5.1-channel speaker setup, the sound is simply phenomenal. Going from two-channel stereo sound to Dolby Digital is about as big a jump as going from mono to stereo.

HARDWARE To deliver 5.1-channel sound, the card puts connectors on the back of the PC for a centre channel and subwoofer, left-and-right front speakers and left-and-right rears. The software that drives the card has a menu to set the card for two, four and 5.1-channel speaker systems. One of the best features of the Audigy Platinum is something Creative calls the Audigy Drive. It's not really a drive, but it fits into a standard 5.25-inch drive bay on the front of the PC and is designed to put all the commonly used ports and audio controls at your fingertips instead of having them poke out the back of the PC from the sound card itself.

(The Platinum EX version of the Audigy has an external box that sits on the desktop.) The Audigy Drive has headphone and microphone jacks with audio level control knobs for each one (although the knobs were placed too close to the input/output jacks, so the volume is hard to adjust when the headphone or microphone cables are plugged in). There is a pair of RCA SPDIF jacks for digital signals and another for input/output on the sound card's auxiliary channel, and a set of optical in/out jacks for high-end stereo systems (a must-have for audiophiles).

There are even MIDI-DIN in/out connectors and a FireWire port, which we'll get to in a moment. The icing on the cake is the Audigy Drive's IR receiver. It works with a remote control that comes with the package, turning your PC into a full-blown entertainment system. The remote allows you to kick back and control everything from volume, bass and treble, to the balance of a 5.1 speaker setup, the playback of a CD or DVD, and special audio effects. The remote is overkill if you only use the PC when sitting at your desk, but it's a fantastic feature for anyone who wants their PC (along with its DVD and CD drives and MP3 capabilities) to become the core of a home entertainment system. The one omission on the Audigy Drive is a game port. Instead of routing it to the front where you could get at it easily, the game port is relegated to the back of the PC, sticking out of an empty PCI bay and connecting to the main sound card.

FIREWIRE Besides the wide selection of input and output ports for audio, both the part of the card that sticks out the back of the PC and the Audigy Drive at the front offer an SB1394 connector. The SB1394 port is Creative's version of the IEEE 1394 or 'Firewire' connector, and it works with all Firewire-based devices. This is a great feature, since many new peripherals, digital cameras, video cameras and MP3 players now come with a Firewire connection. Firewire transfers data at 400 megabits per second, about 30 times faster than USB 1.1, and you can 'daisy-chain' many different devices or network up to 63 computers from a single port on the PC.

DESKTOP RECORDING STUDIO While the Audigy Platinum is a game-player's dream and can form the foundation of a home theatre system, it can also turn the desktop into a fairly versatile recording studio. The MIDI inputs on the Audigy Drive allow you to hook up digital music hardware, and the FireWire system is an easy way to transfer audio to and from other devices. I'm not an e-musician so this point isn't something I can vouch for, but Creative says the card is compatible with professional audio gear such as AES-EBU equipment, and the EAX ADVANCED HD optimized driver is designed for low-latency ASIO support, providing low-latency multi-track recording. There's also an application that supports recording on mini-disc players. The core of the software package is Creative's PlayCenter 3. It is a suite of programs for playing music, adding effects and recording tracks, with API support for Microsoft's Direct Sound, OpenAL, Dolby Digital 5.1 mixing and the Eeagle 3.0 Graphical Librarian Editor. The Dream player software that's bundled with the Platinum package, for example, lets even a novice tinker with Dolby Digital audio signals, directing the path of a specific frequency range to make a certain instrument sound like it's coming from a specific part of the room.

If you like mixing your own tracks and effects, the software handles things like time scaling, which means you can slow down or speed up a track without changing the pitch (so that your tinkering doesn't start to make things sound like a recording by the Chipmunks or, alternatively, James Earl Jones at the bottom of a well). There's also a huge software bundle of 15 titles for entertainment and making music. And when you're finished creating a sonic masterpiece, the software has a built-in CD-burning system to control your CD-R or CD-RW player (or minidisk). If you want to make CD copies of your old vinyl albums and cassettes, the built-in audio clean-up feature removes hiss and scratches from old recordings with the click of a button. In short, this card has pretty much everything the home audio enthusiast dreams of. PLAYCENTER 3 PlayCenter 3 is one of the strengths of the Audigy Platinum system, but it was also the root of my biggest complaints. First of all, there are a few glitches in the initial version of the software (knowing Creative, though, you can bet a patch will address these soon).

The CD player refused to work properly with my CD-R drive, playing tracks at random and not letting me choose a track number, even though it worked fine with another CD-ROM in my system. When I went back to the default Windows player the drive worked perfectly, so it wasn't a hardware problem. The software seemed to have trouble remembering settings. Rebooting would sometimes cause it to revert to a two-speaker setup instead of four- or 5.1-speakers, and the bass and treble would revert to the default 'flat' setting. The on-screen remote also popped up spontaneously for a second or two every now and then in games like Diablo II - annoying.

Audigy Sb1394 Eax Advanced Hd Driver For Mac Pro

PlayCenter 3 also takes over your operating system in a number of distressing ways. First of all, the installation process adds a Creative Technologies splash screen that appears and plays a little signature tune during bootup, adding several seconds to the boot process. I hate it when vendors do this, and to make matters worse, I couldn't find any way to turn it off short of running msconfig.exe and adjusting my Windows startup settings. PlayCenter also extends tendrils into various parts of the operating system, whether you want it to or not.

It installs a media player that does its best to be the default application for everything from playing CDs to watching video. In some cases, I liked the player's options, other times I wanted to use a different company's player. Creative makes this possible, but grudgingly, forcing you to navigate a number of sub-windows to find the appropriate check-boxes. PlayCenter installs several toolbars, which are handy, but I'd rather have them launch when I want them instead of running in the background all the time and taking up valuable system resources.

You can deactivate them, but it's a hassle involving more time in the maze of drop-down windows. Overall, though, the drivers and applications are a huge improvement over the control centre for the previous line of SBLive! The Audigy card behaved well and didn't cause a single system crash or 'hang' during the review period. SETUP Creative has obviously put a lot of effort into streamlining the installation process, but since there are several pieces of hardware and lots of cables and software involved, it's still not a task for the faint of heart. If you're not comfortable working with cables and boards inside the PC, try to have an expert install this package for you. A person with medium-level expertise with both computer and stereo equipment should be able to tackle the project, but put aside at least an hour to be safe.

You have to install the Audigy card in a PCI slot, install the game port in a free slot on the back of the computer and hook it up to a connector on the card, then plug in all the wires from things like your CD-ROM and DVD-Drives. Then you need to install the Audigy Drive in an open bay in the PC, and run an IDE-like cable and a secondary Firewire connection to hookups on the main PCI card. Some of these cables aren't well labeled, and in several cases it takes intuition and a bit of luck to get the wires in the right connectors and orient things like the ribbon cables correctly. Then there is the massive software bundle, which has a simple installation process but which took more than 10 minutes to complete, even with a fast CD-ROM. THE VERDICT The Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum is a state of the art sound card that's an excellent choice for both gaming and mixing your own tunes, or simply listening to top-quality audio through your PC. At $250 (retail) it's pricey, considering you can get whole PCs these days for around $700, but you won't find this type of card in any of those entry-level machines. With this card you also get the added benefit of the Audigy Drive and a built-in FireWire adapter, each of which would cost a pretty penny on its own, and a software bundle that would cost hundreds if bought separately.

So after you get past the initial sticker-shock and price out this card and all its capabilities, it actually works out to be quite a bargain. In short, the Sound Blaster Audigy gives you the best sound you can get on the desktop. Aside from some minor software glitches, the wealth of features turns your PC into a sort of hybrid home-theatre and recording studio. It's not going to be for everyone, but if you spend a lot of time at your computer and top audio performance in games or music is important to you, or you want to make it the heart of an entertainment system, this card is a must-have. Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s comment community. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff.

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