The new and improved Audigy 2 External Drive looks as close to being an Extigy as makes no difference. This in itself is good, as the Extigy is a great looking piece of kit. However, the old drive was decidedly smaller and more solid - the new one feels kinda light for something of its size. I personally have the unit up in my desk next to the cable modem in its PS2-style upright configuration. :
As you can see above, the ports are distributed pretty much equally between the front and back. Lets check out the I/O and functions on the front first of all:
In the photo above you can see the front SB1394 connector, and the two optical ports, one for input and one for output. The most widely used application of these is the transfer of music from the PC to a Mini-Disc player, but I actually use the optical out to connect to my hi-fi. I do this because long optical leads are inexpensive, and do not suffer the same EM interference as you can get on cheap digital coax, despite it being arguably inferior to top notch digital coax. The Audigy 2's SB1394 port allows you to attach a plethora of IEEE1394 (firewire) devices, including D.A.P audio players, external hard disks, CD-RW drives, camcorders and digital cameras etc. The Audigy 2 only supports passive devices - those that eat more than 2 watts of power will need their own power supplies.
The left-most port above is an analogue Line-in. This Port will be of particular importance to musicians since it allows you to connect electrical instruments such as guitars and keyboards or even an extra microphone to your PC. Next to this is a full size microphone port, which doubles up as a second line-in with full gain control. The right hand port is a full-size microphone port which allows you to use professional grade headphones such as Sennheiser’s and Grado’s without an adaptor.
These two knobs control mic/line-in volume and the master volume. This is very handy-especially if you use an old IBM keyboard like me, without all the fancy volume controls included. Pushing the volume knob in mutes the output entirely (Very handy feature if the phone rings). The rightmost button is CMSS control. CMSS stands for Creative Multi-Speaker Surround and makes ordinary stereo sources seem like they surround you (even if you are using 2.1 speakers). The old Audigy and most other multi channel sound cards do this automatically to a certain extent in that if you have a 5.1 / 4.1 system they duplicate the front stereo signal to the rear speakers simultaneously. With Audigy 2 CMSS however, you also get full audio from the centre channel in a 5.1 setup, and rear centre audio in a 6.1 setup. The effect is excellent and highly recommended.
