Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum EX

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum EX

October 3, 2001

Sound Cards (Related reviews)

Today we are going to examine a new product from Creative. Probably the very long-awaited product Sound Blaster Audigy sound card will replace all possible versions of the today's sound card leader - Sound Blaster Live! with an audio processor EMU10K1 onboard.

The most complicated material of the review is written in italics so that you may omit it. There are no any press-releases here. :) So, if you want to read specs and ads just go to another web-site or better right to the official Audigy's site.

"Audigy"

There are several versions of origin of the word Audigy. The first one is that this word is made up of audio and digital. We are living in a digital age, you know, that is why audio must also be digital :). Another version is that it is combined of audio and prodigy, and the last one I know is that audigy means "make to listen" in Esperanto.

But before we turn to the card in question, I'd like to attract your attention to the company. Creative is often accused of the market monopolization and of low-quality products.

But all these points of view are wrong since the company became a leader in the market after a long tough struggle. Besides, its products were always of high quality, and prices were always moderate. Here is a bit of history.

Chronology of Sound Blaster sound cards

At the beginning a computer sound was produced by a PC speaker which could only utter tones of a single frequency and gnash in DOS games. (As for me, I didn't stand aside at that time and even developed a software polyphonic MIDI synthesizer-sequencer for a 1-bit speaker in assembler in 1988). Nobody was pleased with such a situation and many of those who could use a soldering iron assembled simple DACs on a resistive matrix. Such devices were called Covox. The sound was much better than that of a PC speaker; you could hear a result of mixing of several digital streams, and many exchanged various sampler music editors - ScreamTrackers. But a PC platform with its crippled DOS in 80s and at the beginning of 90s was considered a solution for offices and beginning programmers. Major audio companies (manufacturers of professional hardware and software) didn't take it as a competitor for multifunctional Macintosh and ATARI home systems.

Creative had a different point of view. The first steps of the company (in 1987) were quite weak, but its audio solution was quite innovative for 1988. It had a appropriate 12-voice FM-synthesizer Creative Music System (C/MS) with a digital part (ADC/DAC) and a set of its own programs for creation and editing of music (C/MS Composer, C/MS Intelligent Organ and C/MS Multimedia Presenter). But priced at $400, this product wasn't very popular with users.

The situation was very similar to NVIDIA with its first NV1 chip, which crashed, though was rather innovative for its time.

At the same time, the North-American AdLib company released a simple and relatively cheap sound card with an FM synthesizer OPL2 from Yamaha. The quality of the MIDI synthesizer YM3812 was even higher than that of the expensive C/MS from Creative. AdLib was for a certain time a leading standard for PC and was backed by game makers on a par with a PC speaker and Covox (in games at that time you had to indicate manually the type of a sound-reproducing device).

Creative did keep its head: it took the same OPL2 chipset from Yamaha and released an inexpensive sound card which outscored the AdLib's one in functionality and was compatible with the latter on a hardware level! It was the first Sound Blaster card which became the first normal mainstream PC sound card. Unlike the AdLib which could reproduce only MIDI music, the Sound Blaster card had 8-bit ADCs and DACs onboard which worked in the pseudo-stereo mode. At that time Creative clearly realized its first experience with a high-quality but expensive and unpopular sound system, and they didn't eager for high-quality cards. Everything is good in its season.

After that the company launched a Sound Blaster Pro card with normal stereo up to 22 kHz. It was still an 8-bit card. Microsoft which liked this standard declared it in its MPC (Multimedia Personal Computer) specification in 1991. Since that time Creative Labs got a lot of OEM customers because without a Sound Blaster Pro card inside a system block it was impossible to get the Multimedia PC certification from Microsoft.

Creative, thus, opened its branches in Europe and the USA. In 1992 the NASDAQ exchange released 4,800,000 shares under CREAF index.

After the company gained a firm foothold, it released a long-awaited normal sound card with a possibility of recording and reproduction of a digital sound in 16 bit / 44.1 kHz mode. The card had a new FM synthesizer chipset - OPL3. The card was named Sound Blaster 16. The prices for old 8-bit cards were falling down and users, therefore, didn't strive much for new expensive cards. Besides, a lot of DOS games supported only Sound Blaster Pro. At the same time the PC market was swiftly extending, and Creative started production of a great deal of variations of the Sound Blaster 16 (SB16, SB16 Vibra, SB16 ASP, SB16 Value, SB16 Pro, SB16 PnP, SB16 SCSI etc.) Many seemed to get confused in such a wide range of Sound Blasters...

Some Asian firms made use of such situation: they started selling 8-bit cards marked as "Sound Blaster Pro (compatible)" which were 2-3 times cheaper and had awful quality of sound. At the same time the market offered wavetable synthesizers with 1 MBytes ROM with samples of 128 GM instruments. The users were discussing the advantages of WT synthesis over the FM one (the latter was used in all Sound Blaster cards). Creative didn't like the situation and started searching for ways to strengthen its image.

There is an interesting story how Creative bought E-mu, a famous developer of professional audio technologies, first of all sample-based ones. The founder of E-mu, Dave Rossum, a manager of the development department with Creative Technologies afterwards, says that they also got a proposal from another company to license their technology. But if they had agreed, they would have had to exclude Creative from all their future licences. They had several weeks to think about it and a couple of guys which could get into contact with Creative. At last they got in touch with COO (Chief Organization Officer) and CFO (Chief Financial Officer) who both

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