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Creative is a company that could use some good news. The PC audio giant has been battered in recent quarters as the US PC market has become increasingly saturated and more of the technology it pioneered has been integrated into motherboard chipsets. Creative's recent financial woes have led the company to refocus its efforts on its core competency: audio. In making this move, Creative is transitioning out of graphics and other market segments where it attempted to secure a foothold, but was unable to capture substantial market share.

According to Sim Wong Hoo, Creative's CEO, Creative will focus on its retail audio business, though the company will be moving away from its lower-margin audio products. Sim conceded this will lower the company's overall revenue, but he believes the shift will brighten the company's broader financial outlook.

To that end, Creative has unveiled its new Audigy line of sound cards, which are the new flagship audio products for the struggling giant. These cards bring to market a host of new features, including more audio processing horsepower, a new iteration of Creative's EAX extensions for games, and perhaps most notably, FireWire.

Audigy, in its four load-outs, is intended to cater to all audio tastes, ranging from gamers and MP3 rippers, up through audiophiles and weekend warrior musicians. Audigy enters the arena against Hercules' Fortissimo 2 and GameTheater XP, Philip's Acoustic Edge, and Turtle Beach's Santa Cruz. Of cards currently on the market, Audigy now becomes the one to beat, although at the low-end of the market, Hercules' Fortissimo 2 is a great deal at 60 bucks (see our review here). Creative has set most of the audio standards over the years for consumer PC audio, and Audigy is the latest chapter in this story. We decided to really dig deep into this new sonic beast to see what lies within, and whether Creative still has that ability to lead markets.

Note that in addition to the Audigy sound card line, Creative will also be debuting new lines of PC speakers in the coming weeks. On October 5th, PC Magazine published a First Looks review of Creative Labs Boosts Sound Blaster Series.

Unlike 3D graphics, improving the audio experience isn't a function of making audio go "faster," but finding new applications that compel PC users to use their machines as audio production tools. MP3 obviously did much to rekindle interest in playing with audio, but that aside, PC audio hasn't had another killer app come along in quite some time. Likewise, two-channel positional audio has given way to multichannel audio in 4.1 or even 5.1 speaker setups, but two-channel HRTF-based 3D positional audio in headphones remains an effective way to achieve a good overall effect.

While Audigy isn't so much revolutionary as it is evolutionary, we believe its feature set is sufficiently novel to warrant a serious look, and so we took a long look under the hood and investigated its performance in depth. The Audigy board does deliver compelling audio and even basic video production functionality to audio and video producers. As mentioned, it includes FireWire support (which Creative is confusingly calling SB1394), permitting the board to communicate not only with hard drives and external audio gear, but with digital camcorders as well, letting users acquire video through Audigy, and edit the video with included video editing software.

Audigy incorporates Creative's new 10K-2 audio processor, which can handle 64 simultaneous wave streams, and has a new 32-bit effects engine capable of running four simultaneous effects (like the current Sound Blaster Live), though future driver versions will support more. Creative declined to specify how many more effects, and we're guessing eight total. Also interesting is Audigy's support for six-channel 96KHz 24-bit playback resolution (max recording resolution is 48KHz 16-bit). This support, coupled with its six-channel analog output, and FireWire and S/PDIF interfaces, would seem to have Audigy primed for DVD-Audio drives and playback when these drives and content make their ways to PCs over the next several years. When asked about this, Creative coyly admittedly being headed in that direction, though not with this incarnation of Audigy.

FireWire, which recently won an Emmy award, is the most promising high-speed serial multimedia bus technology going, and with companies like Sony and Yamaha putting considerable support behind it, is going to take its rightful place not only in PCs, but in music gear and home A/V gear as well. It appears that even Intel may finally be warming up to FireWire (even with USB 2.0 threatening FireWire usage in certain applications), as they've conceded that FireWire will need to be an integral part of future PC motherboard chipsets. But such integration could be as far as four years out according to an Intel source we questioned at its recent developer forum.

The Audigy Platinum eX Bundle The Audigy arrives in several configs, with prices ranging from $100 up to $250 (Creative's press materials use the Earl Schieb any-car-any-color pricing convention of $99.99 and $249.99, but I took the liberty of rounding up).

We looked at the $250 Audigy Platinum eX, which features an external breakout box. The eX's software bundle almost seems that you're buying a humongous bundle of software that just happens to come with some hardware. Other models include the Audigy Platinum ($200) with an internal 5-1/4" drive bay breakout box, the Audigy Gamer and Audigy MP3+, both priced at $100.

Here's the complete list of included apps:

Ten Creative apps, which include Audigy's mixer, control panels, a wave editor, media player, and more which we detail later. Vienna SoundFont Studio Oozic Player Oozic Reactor Ulead VideoStudio 4.0 SE Basic Acid DJ 2.0 Cubasis VST WaveLab Lite ReCycle Lite Fruity Loops 3

The one curious omission from this barrage of bundleware is a software DVD player. But there's so much bundled software that it's kind of like being an kid overwhelmed on Christmas morning with too many presents. Not that this is a bad thing.

There's an awful lot to cover here, so let's have at it…

Audigy arrives as a fairly typical PCI sound card, accompanied by a second mini-card that eats another PCI slot and back-panel expansion card space. Connecting these two cards is a very large and awkward ribbon cable inside the PC. This cable limits where the cards can be installed, and eats a lot of inside case space. For a "next-generation" and supposedly forward-looking product, this particular part of the design is anything but….

The mini-card has a large, proprietary connector jack to connect to the external breakout box as well as a FireWire port, which also connects to the breakout box. Unlike most FireWire cards, you need to connect a 12V hard-disk power connector to the mini-card, so that it can supply power if needed by devices on the FireWire bus. Creative supplies a splitter cable so that you don't have to sacrifice one of your power hookups completely, just share it. Once all components, including the external breakout box, were physically in place, we were ready for power-up.

We tested using Windows ME, though Audigy has driver support for Windows 98, NT 4.0, Win 2000, and will support XP when it ships. Windows found the hardware, but the install instructions say to cancel out of the hardware discovery process, and instead run Audigy's driver installer to get Audigy up and running. Once past this little speed-bump, the rest of the install was painless and uneventful.

Grand Central Station The Audigy has so many signal paths in and out of it that it almost requires a Michelin tour guide. But its external breakout box, which can live on top of your CPU or on your desktop is very handy for quick connects and disconnects, and offers a wide variety of ways to get in and out of the Audigy. Here's the run-down:

In:

On Back Panel Auxiliary 1 Line In Mic In MIDI 1

On Breakout Box Auxiliary 2 Line/Mic Coaxial (RCA) S/PDIF Optical (Toslink) S/PDIF MIDI 2 FireWire (in/out)

Out:

On Back Panel Line Out 1 Line Out 2 Line Out 3 S/PDIF MIDI 1

On Breakout Box Headphone Coaxial (RCA) S/PDIF Optical (Toslink) S/PDIF MIDI 2 FireWire (in/out)