Big Sound, Low Price: Creative Audigy

A Bonus FireWire Port

The Audigy sound card also has surprises in store in an area one wouldn't expect. It provides a FireWire port run by the DSP. In the Player / X-Gamer version it is situated on the card, and with the Platinum and Platinum eX versions it is moved to the rack.

The FireWire or 1394 makes it possible to connect peripherals needing rapid data transfer up to 400 Mb/s using plug & play. Peripherals conforming to this standard are plentiful. To mention just a few examples, there are DV digital cameras, hard discs and external writers; but there are lots of others. As the USB 2 is having trouble getting here, the FireWire is indispensable for all high-consumption peripherals. There is another interesting possibility: you can connect up to 63 PCs in a network. In practice, this function will be used to play in networks of two, three or four computers. In other words, with FireWire's transfer ratio you won't have any overloading. Creative offers an optional cable for joining two PCs, and you can easily connect a PC equipped with Audigy to one equipped with standard FireWire. Creative rejects its own FireWire standard, which the manufacturer calls SB 1394, but the compatibility of the port seems good. We tried out a Sony digital camera, the DVRP100, a QPS Que ! Fire 16x writer and a QPS Que ! Drive 20 Go hard disc drive, which uses a Western Digital mechanical base.

We carried out file transfers to test the Audigy processor's ability to handle the data from the FireWire port. With a FireWire card using the Lucent FW323-04 processor, copying 100 Mb onto the disc took 15 seconds. With the Audigy card, the same operation took 22 seconds. So you can't expect full output from the FireWire using the Creative system. On the other hand, the sound load on the card did not seem to hinder the output, because the time needed only went up to 24 seconds while listening to music coming from a digital source and accompanied by a Concert Hall effect.