Installation
Installing the card requires a free PCI slot of course, as well as a free Molex PSU connector for the floppy style converter supplied (or you can use a floppy connecter directly). This extra juice is needed to power the breakout box, allowing it to work without an external power source. A nice touch, given the 5-6 wall sockets already needed to run a modern PC and its peripherals. Connecting the external breakout box could not be easier. You simply plug in the wide lead, which I assume provides power and signals from the various controls, as well as a FireWire lead, which may or may not also provide power, as well as the ability to use the additional FW slots found on the box itself.
Prior to installing the Audigy 2, I had Creative’s original Audigy Platinum fitted, so I uninstalled the drivers from the control panel. All seemed to go fine, so I rebooted and inserted the Audigy 2 installation disk. Again, all seemed to go fine up to the completion of installating the drivers, upon reboot however, I was greeted with a blue screen portraying the dreaded words “DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL”. It's sure been a while since I saw an XP blue screen, but I was able to boot into safe mode and remove the Audigy 2 drivers. When I rebooted (yet again) windows found new hardware and installed the drivers automatically. Good to go...right? Wrong. It seems that the Audigy 2 is more than happy to work with basic functionality with the Audigy 1 drivers windows ‘cleverly’ found. When I tried to reinstall the Audigy 2 applications however, none of them would initialize, claiming that no Creative sound card was installed. Since my XP installation was not exactly in tip-top shape to begin with, I used this as an excuse to backup, format and reinstall windows. Not the best first impressions to this reviewer, that’s for sure. My advice for users upgrading from the first Audigy is to uninstall the drivers fully from the control panel, remove the device from device manager, delete all Creative directories, and finally use a registry cleaner to remove all traces of the drivers from the registry before installing the new card – I have since tried this, and it worked without issue.
Connecting the speakers to the Audigy 2 card without the quick-start guide is a pain to say the least, as there is none of the usual colour coding on the jacks as you might expect. If you have read my review of its predecessor, you will see this was a criticism of that card too. I agree that gold coated connectors might lead to better sound quality, but would an adjacent sticker really be too much to ask? For reference, here is the correct order :)
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| Intel System | | CPU | Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz | | CD/DVD | Pioneer 16X DVDROM Drive | | Motherboard | Abit BE7-R | | Memory | 512MB OCZ PC3700 DDR RAM CL2.0 | | Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda 120GB 8mb cache | | Video Card | Hercules Radeon 9700 Pro | | Sound Card | Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Platinum EX | NIC | | |
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