Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Internal Sound Card

I bought this card as an upgrade for my default Dell system, having done a little shopping around for a good deal. I was attracted to this card for several reasons - A) It supports 5.1 surround sound (just got some new shiny speakers to play with y'see), B) I trust Creative to make a reliable and compatible product, since I'm not a computer whiz, and I don't have the time or experience to reconfigure stuff just to get it to work, and C) The price is just about right. Installation was a breeze - like always just follow the instructions carefully and make sure everything is connected before you close the case - this model comes with a separate cable to link the sound card to the digital port on the CD drive. My XP system detected everything right away, and the software installed without a hitch. There's a few different programs bundled with the card, including EAX, THX and speaker configuration support, all of which is nicely presented and was helpful when setting up my speakers. The 5.1 surround support is just as groovy as I'd hoped, and the card software made it a breeze to adjust the levels, configure Winamp 5 to play through all the channels, and add funky effects. I don't really have much use for all the software included, but I can imagine if you were starting from scratch, or, conversely, quite an advanced user, you might enjoy the various different functions included here. I'm a bit middle-of-the-road to need all the bells and whistles, but I appreciate them being there. So, easy to setup, easy to use, simmering with latent power and nicely priced. I admit that I was also persuaded to get this card for secret reason D) It came bundled with Raven Shield (and Angel of Darkness, but I'm treating that as a fancy test for my speakers rather than a `real' game...I'm such a snob) which sounds awesome through this card. A great buy for a lower end user who wants to ramp-up their audio experience without breaking the bank (or an eardrum). Recommended.

This is one of the best sound cards you can get for this price. Using it will give you around a 10FPS boost when gaming as it has a very low cpu load (if you have a onboard sound card, the sound processing load is sent to the cpu but with this card, all processing is handled within the card) It is great for working with audio editors and studio apps like FL studio as it has great asio support and can handle hundreds of sound streams at 1 time with out skipping and with out putting a heavy load on the cpu. This card does wonders for music. using the eax console, you can make all music really sound 20-30 times better, the advance eq has a feature that will increase the detail of all audio making all music sound much better. PS some people on many different forums have been able to use creative x-fi drivers for this card and enable x-fi sound features. (i don't recommend doing this unless your very skilled with regedit as theres a high risk of something going wrong and you will need to spend hours in the regedit tool in windows)

I'd just like to say that I was immediately impressed with the sound quality after I clicked on My Computer right after installing it. The stereo separation seems better than my old SB PCI 128. I purchased this soundcard for music production and for it's MIDI capabilities. You don't see MIDI specs in most soundcard ads or reviews anymore and this was very worrying to me. With the use of Soundfonts I'm unlimited in terms of instrument sounds. The critics didn't lie about the bugs and quirks though and the bloat. I now have to wait on my mixer to load in order to change the volume. That used to be almost instantaneous with my previous soundcards. Sometimes it gives off an extremely loud popping, squealing noise though its only for a fraction of a second at a time. When it happens you feel really weird after. If it went on for any longer I feel that it could cause hearing damage and/or damage to your audio system. I'm not sure whether that's the infamous "Squeal of death". Here and there, there are bugs in the soundfont bank manager. Even so, none of these issues have prevented me from making and listening to excellent sounding MIDI music via soundfonts. Soon after installing the card my system rebooted almost randomly while playing a MIDI file. My system doesn't usually do that. Also sometimes some other wierd things happen that didn't happen before. I am very happy with my purchase. I love the feature to add realtime reverb to the mic input and the realtime audio clean-up. That helped me out while watching TV on a noisy channel. I felt a little disappopinted when I discovered that you could listen to any MIDI file using any SoundFont with the Synth-Font program. I guess it felt like the card lost some of it's exclusivity. Another spoiler was that while waiting for my Audigy 2 ZS, Creative announced the X-Fi series. They talked about how much better it was than the Audigy series. That was a tough one. I had consolation in the fact that at my level its going to take my quite a while to harness all the power of the Audigy 2 ZS so the X-Fi would have probably been a waste on me. Plus the Audigy 2 ZS is cheaper.

sehr gute Soundkarte egal ob Spiele & Filme gesehen werden !!!