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Topic: Audigy 2 ZS - Best Settings ? (Read 3741 times) previous topic - next topic
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Audigy 2 ZS - Best Settings ?

Hi there,

I have read a lot about the Audigy cards sounding bad due to upsampling and / or clipping + distortion, etc. Now as I own a Audigy 2 ZS I could use your people's opinion on how to set it up to at least sound as best as possible.

I use it for listening to (replaygained) mp3s with Winamp. The card is connected to an external amp, using decent stereo speakers (Sony TA-FE530 + NuBox 380).

I have a couple of questions:

Mixer / Speaker Settings:

1) I read somewhere that it is NOT reccommended to have both master and wave volume set to 100 % in the Creative Mixer (distortion / clipping).

I played around a little with the infamous "udial.wav", and it gave me clipping artifacts when pushing the master volume above 85 %. Some ppl have pointed out that this test is rather theoretical, though.
So what values would you recommend for practical usage - is it really a problem to set both volumes to 100% ?

2) Should I leave bass and treble in the mixer at the default
50 % and use my external amp's bass control instead (this is how I do it right now) ?

3) Sometimes I also use headphones (plugged in my external amp). Would you recommend Creative's "Headphone" setting in the Mixer or would you leave the speaker setting always set to "2/2.1 Speakers" ? Does anyone know what the headphone setting does to the sound in reality (can't hear much of a difference) ?

Upsampling:

I understand that there is no way to bypass the hardware upsampling from 44.1 to 48 khz (Except using foobar + the resampling plugin). What do you guys think about
the "real-life" implications ? Does it really sound that bad, or is the difference rather
psychiological / theoretical / subtle and can thus be neglected (I like high quality sound, but wouldn't consider myself to be an 100% audiophile) ?
I ask this because I wonder if it's worth using foobar + software upsampling, as I would much rather stick to Winamp (I love its features) and don't care about the upsampling


Sorry for the long posting, but maybe some other Audigy owners could also
profit from the answers. Thanks in advance.

Cheers!

Audigy 2 ZS - Best Settings ?

Reply #1 –
I dont have a ZS, but i can tell you the setting i use for my NS (the usb2 version - im on a laptop)

Yes you can change the mixing to 44.1 in the "device control" or somesuch which gets installed in the control panels. The point was moot for me - i use my sony DAC/Amp for repro throught the SPDIF, and guess what? only frequencies supported by the Audigy2 are 48 & 96 on the digital-out (try setting it to 96 and youll see how baseless creative's claims to "amazing 24/96 sound" are).

The ZS might be substantially different from mine - though i dont see how, everything from the Live! onwards use pretty much the same venerable emu10k DSP - but i have not registered any clipping with volume @ 100%. if you decide to keep any volume slider at less than 100%, dont bother with resampling or dithering: the quantitization noise introdced by all the volume scaling (preamp stacking) will destroy any perceptual gain, but youll still waste CPU cycles doing it.

My suggestions are

Soundcard
set the mixing to 48
set all volume sliders (main, directsound, wave etc) to 100%

foobar
DSound 2.0 output
PPHS resampler to 48
and remove the volume control from the DSP stack, if youre willing to look for quality the last thing you need is another preamp.

... in THEORY an Audigy2 works natively @ 24bits...

... so again in THEORY youd get better sound by setting the output bit-depth to 24

i find it sound slightly better @ 16 with dithering... this might be pure placebo effects though.

get some semi-decent cables if youre using the analog out or its all for nothing.

hope this helps clarify - or confuse  - you some

JT

Audigy 2 ZS - Best Settings ?

Reply #2 –
Quote
The ZS might be substantially different from mine - though i dont see how, everything from the Live! onwards use pretty much the same venerable emu10k DSP - but i have not registered any clipping with volume @ 100%. if you decide to keep any volume slider at less than 100%, dont bother with resampling or dithering: the quantitization noise introdced by all the volume scaling (preamp stacking) will destroy any perceptual gain, but youll still waste CPU cycles doing it.

My suggestions are

Soundcard
set the mixing to 48
set all volume sliders (main, directsound, wave etc) to 100%

foobar
DSound 2.0 output
PPHS resampler to 48
and remove the volume control from the DSP stack, if youre willing to look for quality the last thing you need is another preamp.

... in THEORY an Audigy2 works natively @ 24bits...

... so again in THEORY youd get better sound by setting the output bit-depth to 24

i find it sound slightly better @ 16 with dithering... this might be pure placebo effects though.

get some semi-decent cables if youre using the analog out or its all for nothing.

[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Why PPHS resampler? Quality of SSRC resampling is higher.

Set Wave volume to 100% and set Master Volume to 79%. Master volume above 79% will cause distortion on loud samples. Installing latest Audigy drivers should auto set this to 79% anyway.

Use kernel streaming not direct sound output.

Also see the last post in [a href="http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=16493&hl=audigy]this[/url] thread.