Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro Review

For Creative Labs it is getting harder and harder to compete with the endless and very progressive integrated sound solutions on mainboards these days. I mean, you’ve gotta have a product out there that can really beat beat these solutions. The Realtek High Definition Codecs, VIA’s Envy and NVIDIA’s soundstorm are serious and direct competition for Creative. Luckily for Creative they have monopolized themselves with the greatest goodness of them all called EAX. So you play Doom 3, Half-life 2 and Chronicles of Riddick and face it, you want a soundcard from Creative in there as it does make a difference. Let’s not forget something else also, performance. You can get higher framerates with a soundcard that crunches that sound on-board. Creative is a clear winner there compared to these on-board solutions (which are not at all bad I must add). We’re gonna have a look at these key factors in today’s review.

..Where is real-time Dolby Digital encoding? By now Creative should have introduced this feature. I have connected everything optical here where possible, yet when I play a game and want 5.1 sound I have to convert back to traditional wiring. We are in 2005, even NVIDIA’s Soundstorm solution offers it. It’s a real pity that that this is not introduced just yet. Secondly PCI Express is getting big and very common. If you want to be a leading manufacturer you got to have the first Audigy out there that can handle PCI-Express 1x.

..The high quality that Audigy 4 offers makes it a very versatile soundcard, whether it’s gaming, 24-bit recording or even using the card as home theater solution for sound it is fantastic as you’ll have lossless multichannel audio and everything from way too many channels Dolby Digital to DTS decoding is within your grasp.

From a consumer point of view, the only thing that can compete with this card is the Audigy 2 ZS, making this a very fine piece of hardware. The Audigy 4 Pro is therefore highly recommended.

Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro Review
Guru3D