Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum Soundcard

I first installed this card on an HP machine running Windows 2000 Advanced Server and... Viola! The first time Windows 2000 crashes and gives me the BLUE SCREEN since I first installed it a couple of years ago. I gave the card the benefit of doubt and thought that I had installed and uninstalled too many software and hardware that the machine might have become unstable.But recently I bought a brand new Dell Precision Worstation 530 running Windows XP Professional. Everything was working like a Swiss clock... until I installed the Audigy Platinum on it. Once I did that, I started getting hard crashes and blue screens. It crashed my machine more than 30 times before I finally trashed the card. The guys at Microsoft might have gotten sick of receiving my blue screen crash reports. I downloaded and installed the recent drivers from Creative's website (revision: AUD-WEBUP-W2-US, Date: 8/26/2002) and it didn't work.Contrary to Creative's claims, this card just doesn't work on Win 2000 and XP Pro machines, or at least the Audigy customer base who use Win 2000 and XP Pro are too small for Creative to bother with a fix.The sounds for gaming and CD play are good, I don't deny that, and it might be a cheap choice for a small home studio (it's not a genuine 24-bit though), but if you're using Win2K or XP pro, it's useless unless Creative finally realizes there's something terribly wrong with the driver and do something to fix it.

Most of the published reviews for the Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum are bunk. Having chatted with numerous end users and techs since initial purchase, my findings have proven common place. Creative Lab's failure to address documented problems dating back to the AWE64 is reprehensible.Strengths:Easy installation, front access controls are very nice (especially the addition of a firewire port), sounds are rich, remote control is cute. The command bar up top can be hidden.Weaknesses:The card may cause some games to crash resulting in a hardlock.Summary:This card replaced an aging PCI 128 Creative Labs. Installation was very simple. The Audigy only takes up an additional slot if your case does not sport a joystick mount.I first installed the card into my main 1.8GHz P4 Win98SE gaming computer residing in a 19" rack; but sacrificing one of the few external drive slots became a problem as well as crashes and intrusive noises (pops, chirps, etc.). The card was moved to an AMD 600MHz Win2kPro IBM Aptiva tower.Would I purchase another? If/When Creative Labs updates the drivers to address some game crashing and bothersome noises, possibly; however I am now strongly considering Turtle Beach.

This is a good sound card for those who wanna be a radio announcer or want to make voice-overs to sFX in radio dramas, but for gamers it's just a lot of fluff. If you are into recording and singing I suggest going all the way and getting the Platnum ex, if you are into games, I suggest the Gamer version, it's (. . .)cheaper and comes with Giants to boot. This card emulates 5.1 channels in most games but is not as good as Phillips in correctly emulating them. The only games I had a real problem with were Baldur's Gate Series(all of them including SoA&ToB). These games cannot emulate speech through the center channel but instead emulate the music/fx in the center. This bothers me personally because BG is my favorite game. Phillips will play speech through center in ToB but not in the others. IceWind Dale works great with this Audigy card but Baldur's Gate II SoA/ToB is terrible. The best games are Creative's 'featured' games, including Diablo, Deus Ex, and a handfull of others. BGII/ToB is on the EAX list but it doesn't work in 5.1(at least not appropriately)'Advanced' HD EAX has yet to prove itself. When games come out(next 6 mo) This card will show what it can do(hopefully). Not trying to disappoint but the Goldmine Demo was not that impressive to me. This Demo was supposed to show the cards full potential with EAX advanced. Birds chirping arounnd and wing flapping was pretty life like but the other things you can do were nothing shocking. I did notice a bunch of static when I tried to run some game demos in EAX that were supposed to be HD Advanced It is probably a driver issue that will be fixed when EAX 3 comes out.To conclude, do not buy this product just because it's from Creative, that is not a good reason at all and they're are better cards out there. Hercules is comming out with Maxi Theater X, a 6.1 sound card(six speakers and a sub= 7!) For right now there is Phillip's Acustic Edge which has an excellent player and Power DVD.

At first i was sorry that the old SoundBlaster Live! line of products was being phased out as I had become so very fond of them. But now that I have bought Audigy Platinum, I realize that Creative has just continued to improve their reputation with this exceptional product. There is NO problem when installing the card and Audigy drive even with Windows XP (I do advise downloading the latest drivers from creative's website to have them on hand for use after the hardware is installed. I have also installed this with Windows Me; no problems, just beautiful sound. It's nice to not need my external Dolby 5.1 decoder that also controlls my digital Cambridge Soundworks speakers, except unless I want to decode a movie from a set top DVD player.I heartily suggest that anyone wondering whether or not this card is worth it to just go ahead and buy it! But you DO need a quality speaker system as well.Thanks again, creative Technologies!