Rating: 
Summary: Bad analog recording, Background noise for digital music
Review: I purchased this product mainly for recording my LP collection into digitial format using my laptop. I thought that this could be a good product for that purpose, until I used it. This product could not record properly from analog input. It's even much much worse than recording using laptop's analog input. Not only the recording level was so low, but also the recorded mp3 or wma had so much artificial noise that it was unusable. I used USB2 connection all the time. It seems to me that USB2 doesn't help any better.
Playing digital music was relatively OK, except that it produced slight background white noise. Still directly connecting from my laptop to the speaker produced much better result.
I wonder what the purpose of this device might be ?
Not recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Where is Coaxial In?
Review: I recommended this product to my friend as an external decoder for DVD surround sound. As an upgrade from Extigy, this thing surprisingly doesn't have a coaxial in. So those who want to use it as a dolby surround sound decoder are pretty much stuck with DVD players that have toshlink out.
As for the sound quality ,it's actually not that bad for a creative product. Definitely a step up from average AC97 onboard soundcards. But I doubt how many people would want to spend over 100 for the difference.
Rating:
Summary: Good hardware, but has room for improvement
Review: I work in the streaming media industry and have used many different types of sound cards...
The Audigy 2 does its job, but I think there are a few annoyances.
1. It is an external sound card with an USB interface, but it still needs a seperate power supply (although it needs just 5Volts)
2. Your computer has to be ON all the time even when you are just trying to route the audio from another external device like your VCR. This makes no sense to me given the fact that this sound card has its own dedicated power supply. So, even though it is an "external" card, it is still pretty much wedded to your computer. I could as well have used a cheaper internal card that does the same thing.
3. The Media control software crashes very easily. Especially when you try to launch the media control when your Audigy card has been powered off
4. When you use the "Mute" button on your remote, many times you find no way of Un-Muting - pressing the Mute on your remote does not have an effect and you have to walk over to your computer and manually un-mute it. This happens to me 9 out or 10 times.
5. There is huge difference in the volume levels of your audio output depending on whether you play audio using the Creative's media player Or some other player like the Windows media player. They have a "smart" volume control but enabling it made the audio sound kind of "choked up".
I would suggest that you buy this card if you plan on using it solely with your laptop. But if you are planning on using this as a control center for all your audio devices at home, then you may want to look some place else (unless you dont mind keeping a computer near your VCR/DVD Player etc and it stays on all the time)
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent product.
Review: No problems at all,either hardware or software. Excellent sound, easy to use. I'm using this with a Dell Inspiron XPS and a small Sony portable speaker system. Obviously volume is limited by the size of the speaker system but the sound quality is excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible Difference VS Built-In Laptop Sound, A Must-Buy
Review: This device is absolutely incredible. Your same speakers (assuming they are relatively high quality) will sound at least twice as good using this sound card compared to what your laptop has built-in. Even when not playing DVDs and just listening to music, the clarity of the sound is greatly enhanced. I would strongly reccomend this product to anyone who uses powerful speakers with their laptop, give it a try.
Rating:
Summary: Not worth the purchase
Review: This product is a waste of money and I can't strongly enough recommend users away from it. First, the sound quality is just not very high. I barely noticed an improvement from using the computer's on-motherboard sound. This product slightly, but definitely noticeably, gives off a clipped & distorted sound, like a poorly encoded MP3. In addition, this product isn't well magnetically shielded, and must be placed as far as possible from any other part of your computer - not so easy when it's packaged with such a short USB cord. Playing a CD through my computer and this soundcard, vs just playing the CD from a Discman, showed a night and day difference - the sound from this product can't compare. Running this product through recording software, even with short shielded wires, showed me a background hiss of -55 dB. Most consumer electonics will have S/N ratios a few orders of magnitude better than that. You wouldn't want to record your LP collection using this product, which is part of the reason I bought it. In addition, the product is buggy. It worked fine at the beginning, and then as I added to my computer and changed the system configuration, it would act very erraticly. If I plugged the device into different USB ports, it would have completely different behaviors, none of which were correct. The installation software is buggy, I've been caught it loops where trying to exit merely re-starts the installer! Creative's Support was very quick and attentive, but not helpful. I know computers well, and I've worked with plenty of hardware, but I've never experienced such a buggy product. As the product is so mediocre even when it is working, I can't recommend this product to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Not worth the purchase
Review: This product is a waste of money and I can't strongly enough recommend users away from it. First, the sound quality is just not very high. I barely noticed an improvement from using the computer's on-motherboard sound. This product slightly, but definitely noticeably, gives off a clipped & distorted sound, like a poorly encoded MP3. In addition, this product isn't well magnetically shielded, and must be placed as far as possible from any other part of your computer - not so easy when it's packaged with such a short USB cord. Playing a CD through my computer and this soundcard, vs just playing the CD from a Discman, showed a night and day difference - the sound from this product can't compare. Running this product through recording software, even with short shielded wires, showed me a background hiss of -55 dB. Most consumer electonics will have S/N ratios a few orders of magnitude better than that. You wouldn't want to record your LP collection using this product, which is part of the reason I bought it. In addition, the product is buggy. It worked fine at the beginning, and then as I added to my computer and changed the system configuration, it would act very erraticly. If I plugged the device into different USB ports, it would have completely different behaviors, none of which were correct. The installation software is buggy, I've been caught it loops where trying to exit merely re-starts the installer! Creative's Support was very quick and attentive, but not helpful. I know computers well, and I've worked with plenty of hardware, but I've never experienced such a buggy product. As the product is so mediocre even when it is working, I can't recommend this product to anyone.
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