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Extigy @ ALive! Sound Blaster Extigy Review Last updated on Feb 12, 2002 Drivers and Software That's all we found in the box! Surprisingly, the Extigy does not include any third party software at all. This is a departure from Creative's tradition of providing generous software bundles with their sound cards, like the plethora of games and audio applications that come with the Live! and Audigy. In the installation CD, we found these software: The drivers A PDF manual: No printed manual is included. Bah! Audio Mixer Creative Diagnostics Creative Recorder Quick Start and Tour Creative RemoteCenter Audio Stream Recorder: An interesting application to record streaming audio from the Internet PlayCenter: Creative's flagship jukebox software New Driver Utilities To allow the Extigy to complement existing sound cards that may already be installed in a PC, including the Creative's own Live! and Audigy sound cards, a new set of drivers and utility programs had to be developed. Creative could not use the same applications like the AudioHQ control panel and the Surround Mixer for the Extigy, since they may conflict with the ones used for the Live! and Audigy cards. Mixer The mixer is similar in design to the one used with the Audigy, but has less features. For Live! and Audigy users, the most notable omissions are the speaker control and testing panel, 3D balance/positioning, EAX environments, Digital Output Only and Dolby Digital decoding controls. Fortunately, the mixer provides adequate control of all the Extigy's features, including volume, muting, treble and bass boost, front/rear fader and a left/right balance control. A drop down box allows choosing between Auto, 2, 4 and 5.1 speaker modes. There is no headphone or Dolby ProLogic-compatible Live!Surround mode supported by the Live! The settings button below the mixer allows control of Playback Properties. You can enable or disable MIDI of the software synthesizer, turn on bass redirection for sending bass information to the subwoofer line output, and change the volume of the subwoofer. In 5.1 speaker mode, the center speaker volume can also be changed. The Recording Properties lets users choose the recording source and recording level. Four audio sources are provided: What-U-Hear (which records anything that is played back on the Extigy), combined Wave/MIDI/CD, microphone, and Line-In. Audio Control Instead of AudioHQ used with the Live! and Audigy cards, a scaled down configuration applet called Audio Control is provided. It pops up a two-tab window allowing configuration of the wave mixing quality and the sampling rate of the digital outputs. The USB settings change the mixing quality of the drivers. Since the Extigy's drivers use CPU power to mix all sound before sending them to the Extigy over the USB cable, decresing the mixing quality can increase the number of audio streams that can be played back by the Extigy, and also decrease the CPU utilization, which may be useful for slower PCs. However, hearing all CD-quality sound in 22.05 kHz is an absolutely horrible experience. Fortunately, the Extigy is set to 48 kHz by default for the best audio mixing quality. The digital output of the Extigy can be changed between 48 kHz and 96 kHz. Like the Live! and Audigy, the Extigy mixes audio sources at 48 kHz, so the 96 kHz output may provide only marginal audio improvement, if any. Thankfully, Creative did not default this setting to 96 kHz like they did with early shipments of the Audigy drivers, especially since most digital audio equipment on the market do not support 96 kHz input. What's Missing Compared to the Live!Drives and AudigyDrives, there is no option to enable or disable automatic headphone muting. Once a headphone is connected to the Extigy, the line outputs and Digital Out are muted. S/PDIF bypass is also missing here, which is a convenient feature provided with the Live!Drive and AudigyDrive to allow it to pass a digital signal from the optical or coaxial input to the digital outputs without going into the sound card. Unlike the Live! 5.1 and Audigy, Dolby Digital decoding cannot be turned on or off. Once a Dolby Digital signal is detected on the digital inputs, or output by a software DVD player in S/PDIF mode, the Extigy automatically turns on its internal Dolby Digital decoder. There is no way to use the Extigy to output a compressed Dolby Digital or DTS signal from a software DVD player either, since the decoder cannot be turned off. We're hoping that the engineers at Creative did not hardwire the Extigy to these settings, and perhaps owners may see a new set of drivers that enable these features. PlayCenter The PlayCenter is Creative's standard jukebox application bundled with everything from the Live! and Audigy sound cards, to the Nomad series of portable MP3 players. It allows playback, categorization and transferring of music. EAXAHD What's interesting to note is that the advertised EAXAHD features of the Extigy can only be accessed through PlayCenter, including adding of environments to music playback like the Concert Hall effect. In addition, the Extigy only supports the music portion of the EAXAHD effects, and not the gaming features. (Find out more about this in our Audigy review.) The effects provided are Audio Clean-Up, DREAM, and Time Scaling - same as those found in the Audigy. When we reviewed the Extigy, we hit a light bulb. During the Audigy review, we experienced increased CPU utilization when using the same effects in PlayCenter, even though the Audigy Processor is capable of taking over the task of processing these effects, thereby offloading the CPU of these tasks. Now that the Extigy is out, we realize that Creative programmed PlayCenter to use the CPU for these effects, so that they can reuse PlayCenter for both the Extigy and Audigy, and possibly other audio products. It is laudable that Creative did not limit PlayCenter from working with the Extigy only, as notebook users may want to continue access their music and playlists when they are on the road without the Extigy.

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