Despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Creative has produced an external soundcard that lives up to its promises.
Creative has been taking considerable strides to corner the PC audio market, and it's seemingly unstoppable with the excellent series of Audigy soundcards and a nice range of speakers to match. Not content with owning a huge chunk of the desktop sphere, Creative has delved into another market (albeit a rather niche one) with their latest offering: a USB external soundcard.
At first glance, the whole idea of a USB soundcard may seem ridiculous. Even on older PCs, the PCI bus can pump through data at up to 133MB per second. A USB 1.1 port seems amazingly underpowered in comparison, offering less than 2% the speed at a measly 1.5MB per second.
So why should you even consider an external soundcard? Because, as the Extigy amply demonstrates, you don't need a lot of bandwidth when it comes to audio output.
The Extigy has been squarely targeted at notebook users and PC owners who aren't game enough to open their PC, and for these two groups it does a great job.
The kit offers a nice range of ports and features. With both analog and digital (optical and coax) outputs, a remote control and even the ability to independently decode Dolby Digital 5.1 (so you can use it with a standalone DVD player even without a PC) it's equipped to deal with the needs of most users.
The Extigy's overall sound quality is great, and it showed a significant improvement in clarity compared to our test soundcard, the SB Live! 5.1. The Extigy managed to exceed our expectations in most areas; music, movies and games all sounded excellent with clean treble and nice rounded bass. Surround sound is excellent, with good volume being delivered to all channels (on many PCI soundcards the rear channels can sound weak) and excellent support for Dolby Digital and EAX surround. The card also produces very little feedback on its analog ports, and even with our test speakers turned up to maximum volume there was only a miniscule amount of background hiss.
We tested the card on an Athlon 1700+ with 256MB DDR SDRAM and a 30GB HDD. Our attempts to overload the Extigy with too much data proved fruitless on most occasions: Playing four large movie files (with audio) while listening to an mp3 and copying a 700MB file across the network failed to produce any noticeable distortions in sound.
If the Extigy has one main flaw, it's the need for a separate USB controller for it to operate correctly. While most new desktop PC's offer this (with one controller for every two USB ports) many notebooks don't - and the Extigy simply doesn't work properly if it's plugged into a shared USB port. For example, when we initially plugged the Extigy in, it was sharing the USB controller with an optical mouse. There was a large amount of feedback (manifesting itself as pops and cracks) when skipping back and forward in movie files, and the initial 30 seconds of playing an MP3 produced similar effects.
Moreover, despite its external nature the Extigy isn't very portable. Unlike many USB products, the unit needs its own power supply, so it can't be employed while you're on the move. It's also not much use without a matching set of surround speakers, and carrying a notebook, Extigy and a set of speakers with subwoofer is going to be a major hassle for most of us.
On the other hand, most laptops are simply shuffled between the home and office, so for people who exclusively use a notebook the Extigy is actually well suited to their lifestyle. You can have the Extigy and speakers permanently installed at the end you need them most, and simply plug in when you arrive.
SoundBlaster Extigy
Company: Creative Labs
Price: AU$399
Distributor: Creative Labs
Phone: (02) 9666 6100
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