The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA card from Creative is one of the best options for making music on a laptop. It is also a fantastic option for gamer or cinema enthusiasts!
The Audigy 2 ZS is a PCMCIA audio interface with the all-important ASIO, with support for up to 24-bit audio at a 192kHz sample rate. And yes, it can run just fine at 20-bit and 96kHz! Remember, most of the music that we listen to is 16-bit (at best) and 44.1kHz.
According to Creative labs the Audigy boasts an “incredible 104dB SNR” and well, we’ll either take their word for it or decide that we don’t care. I’ve got traffic and air-conditioning 24-7… you know what I mean?
The Audigy 2 ZS Notebook card has built support of 7.1 surround sound for Dolby® Digital EX as well as DTS-ES™ supported DVD movies. It will also give DirectSound3D games and CMSS 3D virtualized (that means fake) 7.1 stereo music. There is hardware accelerated EAX® 4.0 ADVANCED HD™ that will appeal to gamers both in terms of resolution and speed.
But I am a musician. I bought this card because I wanted good quality, low latency, ASIO support, at least a 20-bit and 96kHz resolution and free USB and Firewire ports!
I have primarily used this card with Reason by the Propellerheads and have found it to be completely trouble free. Creative has definitely, in my experience, gotten their driver releases to be much more stable than they were in the past and perhaps more stable than other manufacturers of this caliber of audio interface.
I have also used this card with products from Sony Digital Media such as Sound Forge, Vegas and Acid Pro. These amazing products are pretty much my bread and butter when it comes to audio and video and having worked with them for over 10 years I should probably write a book…
But I’m too busy making up sounds and grooves to write! And Acid Pro is where I spend a lot of my time after I’m through spacing out in Reason.
The only problem that I have heard with this card is an occasional SPIT during a particularly heavy Acid Pro (v. 5) playback session. A spit is… well, all I can say is you’ll know it when you hear it. But it sounds basically like a few milli-seconds of digital audio noise perhaps where the software is either passing audio too quickly or the hardware isn’t parsing and playing it out fast enough. I don’t know. What I do know is that when I stop playback, rewind a few seconds and playback through the section, it doesn’t happen again. So, I’m confident that it isn’t in my source and that it isn’t a showstopper!
And of course, when I render out my tunes from this baby they sound amazing! Stay tuned… maybe I’ll post something from the bowels of soulcode studios…
Oh, I did want to link to a couple of things out there in the wilderness wide web. First of all, this writer has taken screen shots from some of the applications provided with Creative’s Audigy products as well as done a review of the PCI version of this device. And also, here is a link to Creative Labs page on the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS.
