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 had home studios equipped with technological developments from E-Mu. They were excited with the products their company made and the next thing they found out was that they decided to come to the agreement.

That is why this deal of 1993 was rather a mutually beneficial amalgamation of two companies - of a leader of audio sample-based technologies and of a professional in audio equipment proimotion, than a capture of the poor EMU by the monopolist Creative.

So, with a good financial support E-mu, as a department of Creative, developed an audio processor EMU8000 (EMU8K) which made Creative a leader in quality of MIDI synthesizer sound and of a digital part.

Just look: a WT synthesizer based on the E-mu professional sample-based technologies, 32 voices, storage of samples in ROM/RAM (bank size up to 32 MBytes for SIMM modules), 2 6-stage waveform envelope (delay, attack, hold, decay, sustain, release), 2 low-frequency generators (LFO), a controlled resonant filter and a reverb/chorus effect block, amplitude modulation with LFO1 and Env2, frequency modulation (Env1 and both LFO), cutoff frequency (Env1 and LFO1). An effect type (8 presets for reverb, chorus and delay) is common for all, a depth of each effect is set separately for each voice, high-quality 4-pixel interpolation is used in case of a sample shift.

The new card was called Sound Blaster AWE32 (AWE - Advanced Wave Effects, 32 stands for the number of voices of a MIDI synthesizer). The card was fully compatible with the Sound Blaster 16 on a hardware level, and the digital part sounding was improved at the expense of more perfect converters. The AWE32 was the best card for budget home audio studios at that time.

A bit later the company updated the card. The Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold is available on the market even today. It has 64 voices, with 32 being a not very good program synthesis of the Creative WaveSynth, but 32 hardware voices were more than enough at that time. This card was a flagship of the SB32/AWE32 series. By the way, the company made the first attempt to realize 3D sound (or rather, sound panning). The technology was named E-mu 3D Positional Audio. The card met the requirements of the Plug'n'Pray specification from M$ and supported DirectSound on a drivers' level. The card had an S/PDIF interface (16bit 44.1 kHz).

When the PCI bus came Creative got some troubles. The competitors were selling out their PCI cards, and Creative had nothing to oppose to them. According to Dave Rossum, although they had a sample of a card with the EMU8005 on the PCI bus Creative didn't want to mount an old chip on the new bus. They needed a completely new product to take a lead. While losing its market and profits, the company decided to wait and see what its competitors would come up with. At the same time it was developing a new audio processor. But major OEMs weren't pleased with such a situation. They needed a new brand product - a sound card which would associate with high quality and reliability.

Creative thus agreed to endanger its temporary "mercenaries" and its reputation, and released PCI cards on chips from Ensoniq,

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