Creative Audigy 4 Pro: The Ultimate Consumer Sound Card?

Drivers And Software, Continued

The S/PDIF I/O settings let you decode an external Dolby Digital source!

Another tab you shouldn't neglect: headphone management. You can choose to mute the speakers when you plug in headphones.

MediaSource now lets you upmix to surround using the DTS Neo:6 process.

Neo:6 has music and cinema modes, but in this case only the music mode will really be usable. Few music tracks are encoded.

Aside from its own software, Creative gives you two games - Thief: Deadly Shadows and Hitman: Contracts. It also includes a set of software oriented towards amateur musicians, including Cubase LE (a MIDI and audio sequencer), Wavelab Lite 2.5 (an audio editor), and Fruity Loops Studio 4 CE (a sequencer). If you have musical inclinations you'll find a lot to have fun with, even though the Audigy 4 is not a professional sound card (it's not that its performance isn't good enough, but its design approach is different). It is possible, thanks to the availability of ASIO 2.0 drivers, to work with low latencies and professional settings (24 bit digitization). So the card could be an interesting compromise for amateurs who want to do music, multimedia, and games. But don't forget that it is, in fact, a compromise.