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Extigy @ ALive! Sound Blaster Extigy Launch Moving Out of the Box Written by Clarence Song and Lawrence Sim An Extigy poster stands beside the entrance to the reception area On January 29, 2002, just four months shy of the Audigy introduction, Creative invited the Singapore press to their corporate headquarters to attend the afternoon launch of the Sound Blaster Extigy - the very first external Sound Blaster. The Drama This launch got off to a very dramatic start. When the press was ushered into the auditorium and were barely settled down, it seemed that Creative wasn't ready for the launch event. The presenter asked us for another two minutes while they ready the theater. The technical crew were playing that "front-left, center, front-right, rear-left, rear-right" thing from the surround mixer, and a huge guy called Ian was barking at his crew to move the large Cambridge SoundWorks speakers to their correct positions. Another staff brought in a rather old IBM Thinkpad notebook presumably for the demo, and Ian was shouting at him to hurry up. He got some music playing on the Thinkpad, which you probably guess that nobody could make out anything from the pathetic notebook speakers. Of course, Ian was pretty pissed off, shouted at the guy, saying, "You call that music?!" and a quarrel ensued. He shoved the notebook away from him, and a loud smash echoed through the theater. Suddenly, the chattering stopped. The notebook was obviously dead at this point, and looked pretty smacked up, while the two continued their squabble. Chairman and CEO, Mr Sim Wong Hoo stood up and got us to applaud for that little skit. Oh! And I really thought I could chide Creative for not preparing well for the launch. The lesson? Notebook audio simply sucks, and users have suffered long enough. Point taken! Extigy Presentation First up was the demonstration of the Extigy. The main features of the Extigy were showcased, dividing the presentation into two area. The first half focuses on the use of the Extigy with a PC, and the next half shows how the Extigy can work without a PC. Extigy with a PC With a PC, you'll get the usual "sound card" type of features, like wave audio, EAX and multi-speaker support. The demonstration showed the ease of installation of the Extigy. Just plug in the USB cable into the PC and the Extigy drivers will take over your PC or notebook's built-in audio. Many audiophile and instrumental recordings were played to flaunt the "24-bit 96 kHz" audio output. In fact, the phrase "24-bit 96 kHz" was repeated many times, and it seemed obvious that Creative is banking on this to convince people of the audio quality of the Extigy. EAX and Effects Next up was a showcase of the EAX features embedded in PlayCenter 3, also included with the Audigy. The Extigy misses out on the advanced gaming effects found in the Audigy, and only has the music portion of EAX Advanced HD, providing these features: Time Scaling: speed up or slow down audio/video without affecting the pitch DREAM: spins music around the speakers in a multi-speaker setup Audio Clean-Up: removes pops and clicks from noisy audio sources For those of you who love the "Concert Hall" effect, fear not. It is still there in the Extigy and can be turned on and off in PlayCenter, along with the other EAXAHD features. The demonstration was pretty comprehensive, but some important features were not demonstrated, even though the Extigy is said to be capable of these: Gaming with DirectSound3D positioning and EAX Playing back DVDs with a software DVD player Extigy Without a PC Paul Seow, Manager of Business Development Operations, doing the Extigy demonstration. The stuff on the table (from left to right): the projector used to show the DVD movie, a portable Sharp DVD player, two Extigys and the notebook used for the demonstration. An internal sound card is practically useless when the PC is turned off, but with the Extigy's external design, Creative was able to do something extra. With the Extigy disconnected from the notebook, the presenter hooked up Creative's recently launched CD-MP3 player to the line input of the Extigy and demonstrated CMSS (Creative Multi-Speaker Surround), which can upmix any stereo sound source to 5.1 speakers. The Extigy has a Dolby Digital decoder that can take compressed multi-channel audio from DVDs and other Dolby Digital sources and decode them to 6-channel (5.1) analog outputs. Unlike the Live! and Audigy, which relies on the CPU to perform Dolby Digital decoding, the Extigy does it with a hardware chip in the unit itself, reducing the load on the slow USB connection. When coupled with a 5.1 speaker or home theater system, you can use the Extigy as a standalone Dolby Digital surround decoder and a stereo to 5.1 upmixing device with CMSS. The attack sequence in Pearl Harbor was played on a portable Sharp DVD player with the optical digital output connected to the Extigy's optical input and it was played without a hitch.

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