Creative has enjoyed a long reign as the driving force in consumer-grade PC audio for the better part of a decade. Launching new product ranges every few years, the Sound Blaster Live! series was the latest and greatest back in 1998, with many PCs out there still with some variation of it.

The release of the new Sound Blaster Audigy range is arguably long overdue, at least in terms of features sets. It will inevitably take some time before software support allows you to make use of
them, however.

The first talking point is the new EAX Advanced HD. At the time, we all thought the original EAX produced incredibly realistic sound effects and now it has been further improved. By reproducing how sound is reflected from various points, the overall reverberation effect can be used to represent a particular environment like concert halls or sewer pipes. In a real-time 3D environment this can have a huge impact on the immersion a game player or listener will feel, giving it the edge over other sound APIs that only simulate source positioning like DirectSound3D.

With the latest iteration found in the Audigy, EAX Advanced HD takes things one step further by simulating the environment in a more realistic way. There are five new enhancements including multiple and morphing environments so, for example, you can be walking through a sewer, listening to a sound that is coming from a cathedral in front of you and hear the transition as you move from the sewer to the cathedral.

All this is made possible with the new onboard audio processor that effectively quadruples the audio processing power. It certainly worked, with our CPU utilisation tests, showing little significant variation with EAX enabled and disabled. The tests were conducted on a 1.33GHz Athlon CPU with 512MB of RAM, running customised Unreal Tournament and Ziff Davis Audio WinBench 99 benchmarks. Unreal Tournament was set to run with both EAX audio and no EAX, and recorded no difference in average frames per second. Audio Win Bench 99 tested CPU utilisation at 44.1kHz, streaming 16-bit audio (CD quality), and gave a usage score of 2.28%, indicating a low CPU dependence.

Like the Live! series, the Audigy Platinum comes with a huge software bundle thats actually useful. The Platinum eX version comes bundled with Steinbergs Cubasis VST, WaveLab Lite and ReCycle Lite as well as Ulead VideoStudio 4.0 SE Basic and Fruity Loops 3. The standard Platinum version also includes full versions of the games Deus Ex and Giants: Citizen Kabuto, though the package here is essentially for the professional consumer who wants music capability. The Audigy drivers also enable a host of sound manipulation features.

Musicians will find some impressive specifications with ASIO and SoundFont
2.1 compliance and a 24-bit DAC and ADC. Unlimited sample size depending on system memory is available along with 64-voice hardware polyphony and 48 MIDI channels.

Other features include the external connector box with just about every audio connector possible. There is an SB1394 connector on the back of the card, which is Creative Labs implementation of IEEE 1394, and can also be used
to network two Audigy-equipped PCs together.

The Audigy Platinum eX is not a perfect product, however. The card requires you to more than just insert it into a PCI slot. There is also a daughter card that occupied a second PCI slot, and there are multiple pass-through cables to be attached between the main card and the daughter card. Not only have two PCI
slots been taken, but the jumbled cable mess restricts cooling and hinders the upgrade process.

The Audigy will have an interesting future ahead of it as more products take up the technology, and therefore rely more on the Sound Blaster range once again. The future looks bright for the Audigy, and indeed anyone with an interest in audio.