Hey guys, I had audigy 2 for a long time .. going on 2 or 3 years i believe. Man im just getting sick of it. The drivers and software suck major arse. For some reason sometimes when i boot up on to xp .. the sound has a echo effect or .. it plays in 2 speaker set up .. and xp doesnt reconized the auidgy 2.Or sometimes when i playback a movie or mp3 it has an echo effect to it. Then i shut the computer off, and then restart it and it goes back to normal. Werid eeh. Also When i try to install new drivers it says it doesnt detect any auidgy 2 drivers .. wtf. Soo im pretty fed up. I moved it to a a new slot. Didnt work .. i heard that this is a driver issue and software issue. Anyhow .. i just lost faith with creative the cards are way to expensive. Soo the cards that ive been hearing a lot about are the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz & Turtle Beach Catalina. They are both the same price at new egg. But im still trying to figure out which one to buy. I read several reivews on them and they compare them to Audigy 2 and The Live! series. Now if you guys were in my shoes which one would you get. Any other suggestions would help me out. Im just sick of this auidgy 2 card cuz it just like it has a mind of its own. And reset its self whenever it feels like it. Soo with that in mind if you guys can help me out i would greatly appricate it .. thanks gurus
The santa cruz is based on the old Crystal sound chip. It has great sound quality but is showing it's age. The Catalina is a Via Envy based card. Pretty standard and medium-quality components. So-so. The only card I think you would be happy with is a M-Audio Revolution 7.1. Also based on the Via Envy, it has much higher quality components then the Turtle Beach card. One of the best sounding cards you can really get especially for the price. Be warned though, you might loose a few fps in games with an Envy solution. They are much more cpu intensive then the Audigy line.
download the kx drivers,they rock, they work on the creative cards (live an audigy), and dont come with creative crap. The only thing is that they dont have eax yet (which is the only reason i put up with creative drivers). Since its free, try that first b4 u decided to buy a new sound card.
music - maudio 7.1 revolutions games - audigy 2 zs wait, why dont you run both? assuming you arent selling your audigy 2, run both at the same time i run onboard and soundcard no problem, run the audigy for games, m audio for music all you have to do is set the primary soundcard towhatever youw anna use at that time m audio 7.1 revolutions A+
