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Extigy @ ALive! Sound Blaster Extigy Review Last updated on Feb 12, 2002 How It Works By using a USB connection, Creative had to approach the development of the Extigy in a radically different way, resulting in several interesting benefits and compromises along the way. USB We all know that a slow 12 Mbps USB 1.1 connection is limited in bandwidth and would be more suitable for low data rate devices like keyboards and mice. Devices like CD writers and portable MP3 players are notoriously slow when transferring data over USB. Likewise, pumping many CD-quality wave channels to an audio device may be possible with PCI sound cards like the Live! and Audigy (which Creative is accustomed to making), but with a USB connection, it is not trivial especially when other devices connected to the same USB bus may be fighting for bandwidth as well. "Why not use USB 2.0 or FireWire?" many users ask. Market - that's the reason. With a USB 1.1 connection, nearly every PC can use the Extigy. With the less common FireWire and USB2 standards, the market for the Extigy shrinks significantly. Adding such connectivity to PCs require purchase of an add-on card, which isn't cheap especially for PC card versions used in notebooks. Thus, a USB 1.1 device is the only way to go. Software Mixing To allow the Extigy to playback multiple streams of wave audio, the drivers mix all the streams using the CPU before sending a single combined audio stream to the Extigy over the USB connection. This minimizes the bandwidth necessary to playback multiple audio streams, especially in games with many sound effects playing at the same time. At a minimum, the Extigy receives two channels of audio in 2 speaker mode, and up to a maximum of six channels of audio in 5.1 speakers mode. Depending on the speed of the CPU and the number of streams of wave audio and speakers used, CPU utilization may vary. 3D Positioning The Extigy can support 3D positioning by mixing and rendering the sound in the drivers before sending the audio over USB. DirectSound3D games are supported and they work surprisingly well given the things the CPU has to do to get 3D sound to the individual speakers over a narrow USB connection. You would probably see around 5-20% CPU utilization for the audio, but it also depends on how many audio channels the game uses, and the speed of the CPU. EAX Fortunately EAX is not done in the CPU, as reverb processing can get very intensive. A custom DSP on the Extigy takes the single stream of audio mixed by the CPU and adds reverb to all of it. This limits the EAX features to a single environment, like those found in standard EAX. The Extigy does not have the horsepower or the bandwidth to provide the EAXAHD gaming features like Multi-Environment that we covered in our Audigy review. Performance With such a CPU-reliant design, the Extigy is susceptible to many things, especially USB and CPU utilization. The faster the processor, the better the Extigy performs, and less audio artifacts will be experienced. We weren't the only ones who have experienced audio artifacts with the Extigy. Check out the reviews from sites like CNET and GameSpot as well. The Extigy should not be connected to the same USB controller as other high-bandwidth USB devices like CD writers and webcams. Also USB transfers can be affected when not all IDE devices are using DMA mode. Creative states this very clearly in the manual that users must turn on DMA for all ATAPI/IDE drives, but we decided to test the effects anyway. On our test system, the Extigy skipped very badly whenever we accessed a CD-ROM drive that used PIO instead of DMA transfer mode. Turn it on and the Extigy works great. We also tested the lower limit of the Extigy's performance by using a dated 400 MHz notebook. Apart from the occasional pops and clicks, the Extigy performed admirably compared to the built-in audio of the notebook which skipped whenever we did something intensive to the video card, like quickly dragging and scrolling around in IE (especially with smooth scrolling turned on). From our limited tests with the first set of drivers, we would recommend at least a 600 MHz CPU for trouble-free audio output. In most setups, the Extigy works smoothly and feels like any normal internal sound card, and new drivers could potentially improve performance even further.

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