Creative Sound Blaster Audigy PCI (30SB035000000) Sound Card

I bought this card to use for a home audio project.
I use the "kx_project" which is an open-source driver for the Audigy family boards that allows the user full control over the internal routing and the DSP.
Audigy is an old technology but for my purposes the used Audigy 2 + the free kx_project driver give me more control than the far superior EMU, RME and M-Audio boards that sell for $400+.


Audigy is a 24bit card but 99% of music is encoded in 16bit. However there are smart software decoders out there that would read the 16bit data and try to up-convert it to 24bit. Check your preferred audio/video player to see if they have such capabilities. Foobar2000 has an option to do that and there's an input plug-in for Winamp. Also if you are using Foobar2000 you can resample to 48000 in the DSP section since this the default Audigy 2 rate.


The Audigy family are not great for recording (at sample rates < 48k) due to resampling issues. The X-Fi technology on newer Creative boards resamples the signal correctly and they use the Crystalizer technology to upconvert to 24bit. (wikipedia)


I was particularly interested in the 7.1 support. Note that you will need special cables (4ch 3.5mm to 4 RCA) to access the channels from 2 of the output jacks.


There are Audigy 2 boards floating on eBay for cheaper that are NOT "ZS". I have searched and found nothing on the topic so I don't know what the difference is.


I also own an X-Fi card and in my opinion when configured correctly the software upconverters in Winamp and Foobar2000 sound better (on a 24bit card) than the Crystalizer and the other X-Fi DSP features. Unrelated, but don't play music in Media Player or iTunes, that's a waste!!

I was looking for a sound card for my IBM eServer xSeries 235 running Windows Server 2003. I only had one free PCI-X slot so I wasn't so sure it would fit my requirements. The SB Audigy 2ZS had all the inputs and outputs I needed, plus the SNR is excellent for a legacy card. I popped it in, and update the drivers from Creative's website. That was it! It works perfectly - nuff said!

It's fit my computer. This creative sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS card is good for low music listen. I decide to buy because It's fit my computer Hardware.

I bought this sound card to solve the latency issue that software synths in a virtual studio environment. In layman's terms, when a key on the synth was struck the sound was coming out as late as 50 ms. later. In addition there were many pops and crackles in the sound. I installed the card and, like magic the pops and crackles disappeared and my latency dropped to 2 ms. which is undetectable.

The surprise was the sound. I was replacing an onboard VIA hi-def sound card. The Audigy was noticably more clear and a bit louder to boot not only for the synths, but also much better in quality when I played MP3s on that computer.

Whether your needs are professional like mine, or you just want a card that plays your music the way you want to hear it, and you don't want to spend a ton of money, this is the card for you.

I didn't buy mine here, but maybe my opinion can be of some kind of use. This is also my first review, js. It isn't X-Fi, but it's nevertheless a good choice, it never complained when I connected my Guitarport without turning off the power, which is more I can say for my internal X-Fi cards(Xtreme Music & Gamer), who btw has major issues with their drivers. My only complaint about the Audigy 2 ZS would have to be the static crackling and popping which gradually occured over the years, but it was probably my fault...major bang for the buck now, I think :)