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Creative picked September 11, 2003 to host a press event and introduce the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 NX and the MuVo2 (read "MuVo squared") to members of the Singapore press.
A New Direction
The press event was an opportune platform for the company to once again emphasize to the members of the press and investors that the company's days of being the "sound card king" is over. Creative now has a new direction and is moving to garner a majority of its profits from a host of new "lifestyle entertainment" products. "Creative is now the undisputable leader in this new area [of personal digital entertainment]," said Creative Chairman & CEO Sim Wong Hoo.
Holding an Audigy 2 ZS card on one hand, and the new MuVo2 on the other, Mr Sim said, "a sound card is a sound card is a sound card," explaining that a sound card looks "boring" while the company's new products have surpassed the big consumer giants with better "IDs" (industrial design).
Creative held a warehouse sale at their Singapore headquarters 2 months ago, and it was a hit with bargain-hungry Singaporeans. So for the 2nd warehouse sale starting on September 12, the company has a bigger showroom for new products, and a much larger warehouse space for old products. Mr Sim said this was a new direction the company is taking to engage customers directly. The company will also work with partners worldwide to achieve this.
Boxes of Audigy 2 ZS at Creative's new showoom
Audigy 2 NX
The Audigy 2 NX was demoed. Creative ditched the design of the Extigy and went with a smaller enclosure similar to the Sound Blaster Digital Music/MP3+ USB device released just a couple of months earlier.
With the Audigy 2 NX, even notebook users can play DVD-Audio discs
As with all Creative products, the sound quality was crisp and clear though it was obvious that the front left and right speakers in the auditorium were duller sounding than the center and surround speakers, which made the CMSS stereo to 7.1 upmixing demonstration all the more impressive to the audience.
The latest James Bond film, Die Another Day, was used to demonstrate the Dolby Digital EX decoding support.
Unlike the Extigy, the Audigy 2 NX has full EAX 3.0 support. It performs DirectSound3D positioning over all 7 speakers. The latest Tomb Raider game with EAX 3.0 support was used to demonstrate the effects.
Inspire T7700
With the introduction of the Audigy 2 ZS and NX, Creative has released a set of budget 7.1 speakers.
A warning to potential owners of the Inspire T7700: I discovered that the speaker stands were attached permanently, causing satellite speakers to be angled upwards. Unfortunately, this includes the center speaker, so if you can only place the center speaker on top of a monitor, the sound will be firing way above your head to be useful. I asked the salesperson and she claimed there is no additional stand that allows the center speaker to fire downwards.
MuVo2
The MuVo2 extends the MuVo line of portable MP3 players. It uses a 1.5 GB internal hard drive to store more data than flash-based players. It has a USB 2.0 interface, which makes transfers much faster.
The size of the MuVo2 compared to other audio players
850 songs is stretching it a little. Most songs are MP3s at 128 kbps, and they are usually 4-5 mins in length.
As with all other Creative products, the signal-to-noise ratio is a big selling point
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