UK Decay

[PJ]

Because the main target for Live/Audigy are "normal" people that want to game, watch dvd's and occasionally make some music.

Back in the old days Creative was pretty good for music making (back in the days real pro audio cards still costs lots and lots more). The AWE64 Gold comes to mind. They used their own chipset and all was well.

Then they started using Emu chips, that came from a semipro card and the problems began. The samplerate was fixed to 48 kHz, and much people didn't know that. So if you made your music in any other samplerate, everything you did was internally converted to 48 kHz and back to your samplerate. So each action you performed passed a sample rate converter two times, talk about signal degradation.
That and Creative's drivers were good for consumer stuff, not audio production (latency, crashes in the beginning etc). Some clever people modified drivers from an original Emu card (the well known APS drivers, which became kX later). And latency got better. But you still have to cope with the fixed samplerate.

All this remained until the Audigy 2 Ex platinum (or Extigy). This one doesn't have an Emu chip anymore, but again an original Creative one, which they fixed most problems. But all the hype remains around Live/Audigy. And it's still true that the Audigy is a consumer card with a little musical ambitions (their DAC's aren't the same quality as M-audio's or Terratecs or any other more pro card).

So it's all a matter of what you wanna do. If you want an allrounder, but with main focus on gaming/dvd/... and want to make music on the side, the Audigy 2 Platinum is good enough. If your main focus is music, but still want some decent gaming and surround the Terratec Dmx6fire 24/96 is much better (better asio drivers, AD/DA, DSP is the same as the Audiophile). If your main concern is music and nothing else, look at higher brands like RME.
ok see you soon PJ ....

[spono]

The good ole issue of soundcards!
Yes Absolutely! I use an ancient Soundblaster 'Live player 1024' on my home pc, yeah I know, its not proffesional. I would dearly love to upgrade my soundcard but its the pennies!

However, the KX drivers do make a definate improvement, but you have to switch your software to run at 48khz. No problem, Cubase SX2 converts the samples for you providing you set it up in the 'project definitions' ( to run at 48khz). Perhaps you may use a percentage or three more memory to store the samples but overall a much slicker performance!

Secondly, once you have your Audio within the PC environment, you only have to monitor the sound through your card. Lets face it these days with lots of quality VST instruments and with Cubase 'Mixdown' and 'Real time export', the music is 'rendered' within the PC so you can still utilize full 24/32 bit recording for the 'Mixdown'! Then you can 'dither' the file down to make an Audio CD or save it to CDR as data! This way retains the Professional qualiity avoiding using the output of the soundblaster.

The Trend I think although, is towards devices such as the Yamaha O1X
which 'breakout' the audio via firewire or USB2 into a control surface that also doubles up as a digital mixing desk. But alas costing around a £1000 perhaps a little above most folks pockets.

[duncan disorderly]

I Thinkk iill stick to my guitar and that
its getting 2 complicated

[PJ]

have you got a sound card yet dunk?

[Guest]