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The Audigy 2 ZS will upmix things to 5.1, as will any recent Creative soundcard. Any soundcard that says it decodes AC3 will be able to decode it to 5.1. That includes the X-fi. You might be confusing AC3 encoding and AC3 decoding. AC3 encoding is if you wanted to send the digital output...

If you're looking at gaming cards, you're looking at Creative. Luckily, their Audigy series has excellent linux support. Actually, anything they've made before the X-fi tends to have excellent linux support. Of course, the Audigy 2 is a whole generation behind, so it's not as good as the...

opensource.creative.com will tell you that newer versions of alsa have drivers for it. They do. Mandriva should detect and deal with the card automatically.

Don't spoil the placebo effect. And besides, upsampling will change the sound. Whether it will make it better is debatable, but it will make it sound different. As well, I believe mediasource allows you to add effects (such as that of the crystalizer) to the sound when it is ripped, again...

Your sound card came with a bunch of other programs other than the drivers. One of these was called the EAX console. One of the settings in the EAX console is called CMSS. Enable it. It will upmix your 2-channel music to make sound come out of all your speakers even though your mp3 is only...

The Audigy 2 value isn't actually much like the Audigy 2 that it takes it's name from. The Audigy 2 (ZS) card is based around the EMU10k2 DSP, which is what allows the card process sounds and soundfonts in hardware, which is what has given the Audigy series consistently better performance in...

Isn't USB 2.0 faster and more popular than firewire?

Have you tried reinstalling Music Match jukebox? Do other media players, such as Windows media player work? Can you switch Music Match to use another audio output format, such as directsound?

Galeon. It's the only browser I've used on linux that allows me to scroll around by pressing the scroll wheel, and it starts up faster than mozilla. It also integrates really nicely with google.

If you still want to be lazy and use WMP, http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ works great and supports other formats than just ogg vorbis as well. If you want to bite the bullet and use a powerful media player, foobar2000 isn´t actually that hard to understand. Under the preferences dialog is...

I wonder why Creative's engineers would then go to all the work of making the DSP work at 32 bits when before it ran only at 16/48, if it was only going to be downsampled anyway. We know from the EMU soundcards that the emu10kx processor is definitely able to do different sampling rates. I...

There's only one thing on the card that seems to be a real upgrade - it looks like the card will no longer resample everything to 16/48, which should kill half the anti-creative rants out there. Evidence - the specifications page says all effects processing done at 32-bits, so I would guess...

Using the coaxial or optical ports (connected via S/PDIF) on your Z-680's will give you worse quality sound (as its converters are going to be worse than a good sound card's) and only surround sound using pre-encoded content such as DVD's. Use the analog. THX is a special test that audio...

You might find http://www6.tomshardware.com/game/20030405/index.html useful.

Getting an Audigy or better will get you EAX 3 & 4, which do work with 2 speaker configurations. Getting an Audigy 2 will get you DVD-Audio compatibility and better drivers. Getting an Audigy 2 ZS will get you DTS decoding and better drivers still.

If you have Windows 98 SE, you need to switch to the VXD drivers to get any decent support for games, otherwise you will get rather interesting effects. If you are using Win2k or XP, then ignore what I just said. As for whether it sounds better or not, I initially didn't think it sounded...

The DDTS-100 looks fine for his needs. He can connect his gamecube and DVD player to the digital in, his computer to the analog in (or digital if he wants to save some money and use soundstorm instead of buying a decent soundcard) and connect them all via the decoder to the speakers. Thus, he...

Dolby Digital and DTS are both methods of encoding a 5.1 signal, most often used in movies. When playing a DVD, the sound you will be hearing should usually be encoded in dolby digital automatically. This signal is what gets decoded by your decoder/DVD player/sound card which allows you to...

When you say copied to the HDD, you mean installed fine, right? I had problems with the feature showcase as well: whenever I loaded it I would get a bunch of errors, but from then on it would run fine. What operating system are you running, by the way?

Try this site for some reviews: http://www.dreamnid.com/theear/. As for whether a mp3 would use all the satellites, normally it would only use two because mp3's are only stereo. Now, if you ran that same mp3 through CMSS, Circle Surround II, Dolby Prologic II, DTS Neo 6 or some other method...

If you have an Audigy 2 ZS, you'll get dts on any random $5 pair of speakers you find at a grocery store, because it does it all in software before outputting anything to the speakers.

Getting a soundcard that's excellent at both gaming and recording is going to be difficult, because usually those who are looking for a gaming soundcard don't care about recording and vice-versa. For gaming, your best bet is going to be one of the audigy line, but just realize that a plain...

I'm no professional, but I like to start of with as dry of a copy as I can get for the original, then play around with the reverb settings until I find something that sounds good to me. Of course, whether reverb makes something sound better really depends on the type of music: solos and bass I...

The only way currently out there for a computer sound card to encode 5.1 channel sound over SPDIF is through the soundstorm DICE encoder on an nforce2 motherboard's onboard sound. Otherwise to get more than two-channel sound you will need to either use the analog outputs or use pre-encoded...

I've heard that the Audigy LS is actually just a PCI version of the Audigy 2 NX, placing it closer to the Live in technology than the Audigy, and doesn't include many of the features that come with the EMU10kx chips. Of course, if you just want to play games on Windows they will probably both...

You do realize of course that you will only get two speakers playing over a SPDIF unless the digital signal is encoded into something other than stereo (such as dolby digital), right?

The Live is going to give you faster performance in games as it will give hardware acceleration to sounds, and also might give you better sound depending on whether you are playing 44.1khz or 48khz music. So basically, a Live should give you less CPU usage than your onboard sound. Whether...

If you're going to be using it mostly for games then you will want an Audigy 2 (ZS). It might be a 6.1(7.1) card but it gives the best gaming support out there. If you are very intent on not paying for 7.1, you could add some extra cash and get an EMU 1212M, which is a professional card that...

Your problem is going to be that even if you somehow get the EAX 3 software installed, the Live contains an older chip that doesn't actually have the processing power to run it, so in the best case your computer will slow down a bit with EAX enabled, and in the worst case it will be unable to...

Creative's software is actually fairly useful, and as long as you disable all the stuff it loads at startup, it won't affect normal performance any. I'd recommend especially the surround mixer, which gives you good control over volumes, and the EAX Console, which allows you to add reverb and...

Try TweakUI, in the 98 version at least there's an option to disable autoplay of audio cds (and data cds if you're so inclined). http://www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/downloads/powertoys/networking/nttweakui.asp Of course, holding shift when an audio cd has been inserted helps too...

As I said, one of the most exaggerated rumours out there. It's not too difficult to try yourself, just take an ordinary 128kb mp3, encode it to a q-4 ogg and try to ABX the two. I know I can't do it off my Audigy 2 ZS going to ATP3's. As for the 99% the same, that was going by someone using...

The evils of transcoding are in my opinion one of the most over-exaggerated rumours on the internet. If I transcode a 128kb mp3 into a q-4 ogg, I can't tell the difference, and the files are 99% the same. Don't worry about transcoding unless you can actually hear the difference. I can't.

That's weird, sounds like the problems I was having with WDM drivers on 98SE. Have you tried all the different driver updates available on Creative's web site?

Just about everything these days is an AC'97 CODEC. The question is what one. Anyway, the easiest way to check which sounds better is to install both of them, and switch back and forth a few times until you can tell which is better.

I haven't heard the LS myself, nor read any comparative to the ZS reviews on it, so I couldn't really give an opinion on the highly subjective subject of sound quality. As for CPU utilization, 1-3% is still a difference, as shown on this (french) site which has the best LS review I've seen on...

1) This shouldn't touch the analog, if you're using the digital you might as well keep it at 96 unless you're having problems or don't like the sound of oversampling. 2) Nope, only have stereo. 3) Well, if you don't want distortion you should bring it down until there is no fuzz from...

Yes, the audigy 2 ZS does analog. Any computer soundcard in fact does analog. As for the ZS vs. the LS, the ZS has more features, less CPU usage, and works on OS's other than Win2k and XP, but also costs more.

I know Tom's hardware isn't exactly the most respectable review site, but they do compare the Audigy 2 NX's CPU load to other sound cards: http://www6.tomshardware.com/video/20031114/creative-14.html Sudhian doesn't have direct game comparisons, but it says about the same thing: it's about...

Think you might be exaggerating just a tiny bit? Also, do you have personal experience with Turtle Beach's new cards? It's my understanding that they don't have 24/96 DAC's and thus shouldn't have analog audio quality as good as Creative's.