I've been running my new Audigy2 for about four days now and I have to say its a pretty big improvement over my old Audigy card. I'm currently running a PIII machine overclocked to 1 ghz with the Audigy2 feeding analog out to:
1) 5 speaker set up (2 Spica TC50's, 2 NHT Super Ones and a centerchannel) driven by my 5x100 watt Sony receiver.
2) 2 channel set up with the Audigy2 feeding a Gilmore Headamp/preamp, MccCormack DNA1 dlxe amp and Apogee Stage speakers.
Some impressions:
The card is much more quiet than my old Audigy card. I can still hear some machine hash coming through the Apogees at loud to moderate volumes, but it is fairly benign compared to the original Audigy (which was unusable with my primary home system) Neither card, though, compares to the low noise performance of my now-sold Echo card.
The card sounds pretty darn fine with DVD A at 24/96 playback. My new Buena Vista Social Club DVD A disc sounds noticeably better than the cd played back through my Theta/AA DTI 2.0 AA DDE 3.0 home rig. The highs are smoother, image placemnt more solid and 3D and treble and bass much clearer. The DVD A playback kicks booty.
Even playing back MP3's (with 24 bit upsampling enabled) was enjoyable. The Audigy with MP3 upsampling got rid of a lot of harshness and crap that made my MP3's difficult to listen to and I think the compressed files sound much more like 16/44 played back through the Audigy.
Even CDDA files sounded fine played back through my pc with little of the hiss and static that the old card generated.
All in all, I'm mighty pleased with the new card and think the upgrade is definately worth it for current Audigy owners.
Now I only have to find a CDDa media player that performs CDDA upsampling that I can play out through my Audigy2...