Creative Labs'
Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro

Creative Labs' new top-of-the-range sound card is the company's most advanced card yet. Is it a blast from the past or a fillip for the future...

The Sound Blaster range continues to develop and the latest addition to the franchise is, to give it its full title, the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro. Phew!

Installation is straightforward although if you're replacing an existing card, particularly an older Sound Blaster, it's a good idea to make sure all vestiges of earlier software, especially drivers, have been removed.

As well as the main card, there is a joystick/MIDI interface on a flying lead which needs an adjacent backplane slot, plus the External I/O Hub which connects to the card via a special AD_LINK cable. The Hub is a stand-alone box which would sit on top of or alongside your PC. Some earlier Sound Blaster models had an internal Hub that fitted inside a drive bay in the PC which was neat but that's not an option here.

Although you can use the card for stereo, it's a shame to miss out on its surround sound potential. If you've been tempted to explore surround formats but haven't quite managed to get around to it, this card may be the impetus you need to give it whirl.

Centre of all things

The Hub is the, er, hub of all connectivity. It features two FireWire connectors, Optical in and out, a digital out, S/PDIF in and out, MIDI in and out, three analogue outs and a headphone socket. You also get an infra red remote control in case you can't reach the Hub or your mouse, that controls CD tracks and various sound options.

Bundled software includes the ubiquitous Audigy 2 ZS Feature Showcase CD, a DVD Audio sampler disc and two games. Installation includes the MediaSource software suite featuring applications such as a mixer, a surround mixer, EQ, speaker calibrator, DVD Audio player, minidisk controller, audio stream recorder (allowing you to record any audio source arriving at your computer) and a SoundFont Bank Manager. There's everything you need to control the card and its settings.

SoundFonts are essentially sound samples handled by the card which you can arrange and edit much like the samples in any sampler. Once described, perhaps unfairly, as the poor man's samples, SoundFonts were a compelling reason for many musicians to buy a Sound Blaster card. They still offer a lot of powerful sound creation options although they have been overshadowed somewhat by dedicated software samplers. However, SoundFonts have very low CPU requirements and add another sound source to your arsenal, and so are well worth investigating.

Possibly of major interest to musicians are three pieces of music software - Cubasis VST 4.0 CE, WaveLab Lite 2.0, and FL Studio 4 CE. CE (Creative Edition) means that the software will only run with the Creative card so if you change cards you'll need to buy new software, too. FL (Fruity Loops) Studio is a powerful, if somewhat idiosyncratic, pattern-based sequencer with plug-in support for VST instruments and effects.

Cubasis VST and WaveLab are music tools in a more traditional vein. Unless you have specific or demanding requirements, the Cubasis VST sequencer should be able to handle most music projects. It's interesting to reflect that Cubasis is probably ten times more powerful than the original Cubase software! WaveLab Lite is an audio editor and while it lacks some of the major features of its big brother it's still a powerful and usable program.

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