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Creative Audigy Rumor
by Maarten Goldstein, Mar 06, 2002 11:15am PSTTech Report is reporting about a rumor going around about the SoundBlaster Audigy. Some people are saying the Emu 10K2 used in the Creative soundcard is nothing more than an Emu 10K1 with FireWire support, though apparently the FireWire support is seperate from the Emu chip. The Emu 10K1 is found in the Live! series of soundcards. Supposedly, someone from China or Taiwan has hacked Live drivers to act like an Audigy card. Creative marketed the Audigy as a completely new, improved product, replacing the Live cards.
Now, even if this is all true, I'm not sure this one rises to the level of real news. ... But it would seem that we've seen yet another demonstration of how the audio market differs from real, semiconductor-driven markets like graphics and processors. If ATI or AMD were to launch a "new" product three years after the last revision, give it a new name, and deliver a warmed-over version of the same chip with one new feature, we'd crucify 'em. And rightly so. For Creative and the market it leads, this kind of thing is par for the course.
Comments
I just want a true Dolby Digital 5.1 setup - using digital out -> receiver and that distributing to the 5 speakers (well 4 sats, centre, and woofer)
I'm going to go the nforce, since the xbox has 5.1 and people are learning to code for that, it should be pretty easy for the nforce to be easily supported too.
Also no more creative / via problems
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I'm sure everything after the PCI will be different for you
http://www.pcavtech.com/soundcards/compare/index.htm
A ranking of soundcards; a bit dated but still representative of cards today (thanks to the stagnation of the market sector). The SBLive is way down there, while the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is pretty high, right below the professional cards.
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In a few days I'll be replacing my AWE64 with a Creative onboard chip, and any new features it has I probably won't appreciate.
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-The SAMe
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There is a significant difference between the Emu E10K1 and the E10K2 which is the internal datapath of the chip. For those of you who don't know what the Emu E10K line of chips are they are basically audio effect processors, derived partially from the E8000 DSP found on the E-mu EIV/E5000/E6400 line of hardware samplers. The E-mu chips are used on the Creative cards to provide the audio effects processing (Environmental, Reverb, Filtering, Chorusing, Media Stream Separation and Encoding (Positional and Stream)).
The E10K2 differs from the E10K1 in the number of internal filter units, the datapath width (The chip is now 24 bit, up from 18 bits in the E10K1) and several reworkings of the effect stages. The E10K2 has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with handling Firewire/IEEE 1394, the E10K2 is a DSP, it does provide a separate I/O path from the chip to the IEEE 1394 port for Audio over Firewire, but it doesn't handle/mediate/control the port itself.
The DAC's are now 24 bit and the output sampling frequency is fixed at 48KHz (There's a way to force it to output at 96KHz but for most people this doesn't produce better results). Why 48KHz??? That's the OFFICIAL base frequency for S/PDIF digital audio and that's the frequency most consumer and professional audio equipment support). The ADC's are still 16bit @ 48 KHz.
The driver structure for the Audigy changed as well, and can now be used as a low latency audio capture/playback device, that has to do with the E10K2 chip itself since most of the effect stages are now parallel (But can be serialized). ASIO latency changed from 750 ms on the Live! to 25-50 ms on the Audigy.
That "tech report" article? Pure crap?
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GF3 on a POS 15" monitor still looks good, whereas an MX300 on tin cans sounds like ass
almost no one wants to buy 200$+ speakers, along with a 200$ card and that'd still be cheaper than a GF4+monitor compared to the video card industry just for good sound, people think anywhere over 100$ is too much for a sound card and they're right with the quality Creative is putting out
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So Creative decided to add a few features to a sound card and sell it at a higher price point under a different name.... umm.. big whoop? Score one for their marketing department? Don't buy it if it doesn't do something the card you own already does?
I hear people saying that the 'sound card' market has stagnated... and these same people compare try to compare the advances in sound 'technology' to the advances in graphics/3-d technology. Well I think this is misleading, because the audio industry has been around for DECADES and the technology and quality of the products this generated reflect the 'maturity' of the industry.
Now, if we were all using 2-channel, 8-bit sound cards with DACs with piss-poor signal-to-noise ratio, I might be singing a different tune.. but if you look at the Live! series of products (and comparable products from different manufacturers), the sound quality and feature set of these products is generally more than acceptable in today's marketplace.
Face it folks.. there isn't THAT much more you can do with audio, aside from specialized applications (ie: multi channel mixing, mastering, etc..). Human hearing has an extremely wide tolerance range and is nowhere near as 'sensitive' as human vision. As a result, audio 'technology' does not and will never improve at a rate anywhere near the rate of graphics technology.
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Actually that article is absolute crap... did you know that the Emu 10K1 has absolutely NOTHING to do with IEEE 1394 on the Audigy/Extigy? When you open it up (The livedrive) you'll see a nice Creative branded (But I'm almost certain it's toshiba) IEEE Control chip
Read the profile for more Info:
http://www.shacknews.com/funk.y?person=[Zoesch^2]
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What would be a decent sound card that would be a "best bang for the buck" kind of card?
I'm looking to upgrade one of my systems. It currently has a Monster MX400 card in it.
I'm not looking to get the top of the line sound card, but I'd like to have one that supports surround sound and even pro-logic.
Any suggestions?
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yes or no?
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Deceiving consumers is not par, and it's not cool either. I doubt Creative did anything illegal, but if this rumor proves to be true something must be done.
Creative is the sole reason that improvement in computer audio tech has stagnated. Aureal's 3D technology was simply superior (as anyone who's heard Half-Life with A3D 2.0 and headphones can attest), but they didn't have much business sense and wasted money (rightfully) suing Creative, who responded by counter-suing Aureal out of business.
This is coming from an Audigy buyer who upgraded from an mx300 because it didn't have Win2k driver support. I was all ready to start liking Creative again since the Audigy appeared to be a new product with at least some modicum of innovation. . .
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... still waiting?
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http://tech.scol.com.cn/pic/20011161554463.jpg
Look at the header labeled "SB1394". Now, the Audigy can come with a bracket with a 1394 connector, right? If so, then the controller is somewhere on the card, whether it's controlled by the "EMU10K2" itself, or by an auxiliary chip (there's quite a few of them on that card).
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and btw, the audigy's DA converters are better.
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