Zardon

It's no secret that Creative Labs is the trendsetter in the "audio for PC" field. Not so long ago the company announced a new generation sound card aka Audigy2, which brought about a real storm in the Web community. A lot of hardware sites touted the innovations Creative had in store for the happy buyer of its Audigy2. Most of the reviews agree in their tune: the authors praise the Audigy2, hang a lot of compliments onto it, but quite forget to mention its drawbacks.

Actually, Creative should make up for the wrongs it has been doing to users: the company didn't solve the problem of backward compatibility of the previous generation chipsets, gave up supporting digital output through its "exclusive" mini-DIN connector (for old loudspeaker systems, such as FPS2000) and didn't develop unified drivers. The users had to download huge driver and complementary software updates. It was a real hell if you had dial-up connection. Interesting that at the beginning of 2002 Creative approached paper magazines to put the driver updates onto their CDs. All this could do nothing but angry the user who had already counted out a round sum for the sacred sound card.

Anyway, the public love to the sound cards from Creative was beyond all these problems, while the main competitors (like Philips or Turtle Beach) couldn't catch up with Creative, which was providing its sound cards also for the value PC market. Today the user who isn't satisfied with the integrated sound wants to get an Audigy or, at least, Live!.

Well, the Audigy2 entered the market. What's so exceptional about it that it provoked such a sensation? What's so new that Creative offered to the PC community?..

check this full review out over at xbitlabs