Think of sound cards and chances are you're probably thinking of Creative. Thanks to its phenomenally successful Sound Blaster line of cards, Creative is easily the leader of consumer PC audio. The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum Ex is the latest in this range, and is by far the most feature rich. The question is do you need most of these features?
This is a two-part package – a PCI sound card and an external I/O module. The sound card is almost identical to a standard Audigy 2 card, although some of its I/O ports have been moved to the external module. The major differences between the Audigy 2 (December 2002, page 56) and the original Audigy are: 24-bit recording instead of 16-bit; 6.1 speakers instead of 5.1; and support for DVD-Audio. Whether or not you'll actually use or notice these features is debatable. Standard on both the Audigy and Audigy 2 is 24-bit/96kHz playback, gracing the Audigy range with some of the cleanest, sharpest audio on a consumer card yet. These also incur the lowest performance hit on your PC of any sound card on the market, especially when EAX is enabled.
If your main focus is gaming and regular PC use, we have to recommend the much cheaper Audigy sound card. However, if you're using your PC for digital music creation, the comprehensive range of inputs and outputs on the external I/O module might tempt you to splash out for this pack. The unit features headphone out; dual line-in jacks; dual RCA line-in jacks; optical S/PDIF in/out; coaxial S/PDIF in/out; digital out for 5.1 support (six-channel S/PDIF output); two FireWire ports as well as MIDI in/out – far out. . .
It's obvious that this product is targeted squarely at digital musicians. For the rest of us, the 'Plain Jane' Audigy will suffice.