Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS 7.1 THX

[The 47th Ronin]

I am thinking about buying this card for my shuttle, and was wandering if you'll had any thoughts on the card, and coudl link me to any good reviews of it?

Google these days is overloaded with those crap sites like Kelkoo or dealtime, so its hard to find good links to good reviews on technie websites!

Cheers!

[Bruno]

Depends what you want it for, if your using it for watching divx's etc. on you tv then I'd say just get any cheap card with optical out (if the shuttle doesn't already have it) and a cheap surround sound amp + speakers off Richersounds.co.uk.

[The 47th Ronin]

At the moment, I am running onboard sound in my Shuttle, with my Cambridge Audio Amp connected in with my JPW speakers. I wanted to replace these with somethin much smaller and more compact, yet still retain great sound. My plan, therefore, was to buy a good soundcard and a good speaker set. I use it to play music, watch films and play online games. I suppose the other good thing about this card is that it is 7.1, so I could have surround sound. That aside, however, will I notice a sound quality difference between this card and a cheaper one; for this is my greatest concern?

Thx,

Paul

[Platinum]

Ive got one, its a damn good card when used properly, EAX 4 games sound great on it, also get yourself a copy of WinDVD and enable all the gubbins and DVD's sound amazing

[Rabs]

Ive got one, its a damn good card when used properly, EAX 4 games sound great on it, also get yourself a copy of WinDVD and enable all the gubbins and DVD's sound amazing

I second you pal, I just upgraded from an NF7-S to A64 setup with a Audigy ZS. The NF7-S was set up with digital speakers too.

I moved the digital speakers to my SN45G and put my old DTT2200's with the Audigy ZS.

I hate to admit it but the Audigy ZS for sound quality and positional audio is far far better than the Soundstorm even going from digital back to analogue.

If SB ever did a DICE capable card - it would blow the pants off everything out today - no questions asked.

As Plat says EAX4 is excellent.

Which reminds me I must update my sig...

[Agent]

What games do you play that use EAX4 ?

[Platinum]

Jedi Acadamy has a patch out for EAX 4 support, there are a few more but cant remember em off the top of my head

[Platinum]

oh you also have to update to the latest drivers from Creative Labs site to enable EAX4 on these cards....

[DaKid]

Sorry to hijack an old thread, but I was searching the forums for an answer and this seems the most relevant even if it doesn't provide an answer.

I've got an Audigy 2 ZS and Creative T7700 7.1 analog speakers and I'm having real problems trying to get surround sound when playing DVDs.

I've got PowerDVD 4 (full version), WinDVD 5 (oem with Asus Mobo) and AsusDVD (PowerDVD 5 with most of the features missing) which came with my graphics card.

I've installed all the drivers from the drivers CD on my Audigy and I've tried following all the instructions on the creative site (that I could find anyway) and have had no joy

I get full surround in games (damn, Doom 3's scary with that on) and my feature-showcase app makes nice noises, but I can't get the flipping thing working with a software DVD player!

[Rabs]

AFAIK, set the DVD software to use Directsound, hopefully it should be 5.1 - only one DVD uses 7.1 at the current time as far as I'm aware.

As your games use 7.1 at the moment the above should be fine.