[MajinWu]

I'm debating about changing my current AV-710 out. I recently got a pair of A900s and they sound underpowered coming out of the 7/8 jack with hi res mode enabled and Foobar set to upsample to 96000hz with 24-bit padded to 32-bit. I learned that I need an amp to help the card out, but then I found out about the Prodigy and EMU's.

I like the AudioTrak Prodigy 7.1 because it has a nice headphone amp built in and has better gaming support than the Chaintech.

But after reading a lot on these forums the EMU's sound pretty good for music, but bad for games (am I right on that?)

I listen to music 80% of the time and game the other 20%. Do you guys think the Prodigy is up to par with say an EMU-0404? (1212 is too high priced for me). Can either of these cards play the A900s to their full potential?

 

[mikechai]

The Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 LT has just been released. Check it out.

Generally, the LT sounds similar to the original 7.1....

The Prodigy sounds slightly better than the "AV710 in highres mode" but also quite significantly outperfomed by the E-MU 0404.

However E-MU 0404 need an amp to drive headphones to loud volumes. Although you can increase the gain, but that will also bring audible distortion.
So an amp is definitely recommended if you get the 0404.

All in all, the Prodigy is a great consumer sound card and is a good price/performance one card solution for music and gaming.

 

[Glassman]

or if you get your 0404 modded by someone, ask him to replace output impedance setting resistors, that will make a cmoy-type amp from the 0404..

 

[MinotaurUK]

I bought the Prodigy a few weeks ago, and whilst it definitely sounds a notch or two above the performance of the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz it replaced, the drivers are quite a lot worse. They're a bit unstable at best - the machine only manages to go for 3-4 days without a restart, whereas it would regularly be running for 2+ weeks without restarting with the TBSC. The only hardware change has been the soundcard.

I've also noticed the selection of mic/line in source in the control panel is rather buggy. I want the thing to be always monitoring the mic input (for Skype phone calls when I clip on a mouthpiece over the headphones). It seems to routinely flick back to monitoring the line input even when I've selected microphone, so once I've answered a call, the person at the other end can't hear me until I've a) opened the Prodigy control panel, b) hit mute on the input selection, c) hit mute again to return to normal (which puts the monitoring back to line), then d) hit microphone input.

It's very frustrating, especially for the person at the other end of the call who's going "hello, can you hear me" for a good 10-15 secs before I can actually start talking to them.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a solution? Is it possibly to use some other Envy24 drivers for the Audiotrak rather than the "official" audiotrak drivers?

 

[MajinWu]

Well, I'm not going to ever use the mic, but thanks for the heads-up. How's the gaming performance and headphone amp?

 

[MinotaurUK]

I'm pretty sure the headphone amp on ch7/8 is defective on my card (or some of the connections for those channels are). When plugged into ch7/8 I get audio in the right ear, but a much lower volume in the left. Since I've not read anyone else here having the same problem, I have to assume this is just a problem with my card.

I'll get around to sending it back eventually, but I want to sort out the buggy driver issue before I accept another one of these cards in replacement. The audio quality is a step up from the TBSC I had before, but in every other respect, this card is a disappointment.

Looking at a couple of other posts about the AV-710 drivers, I'm not convinced other Envy24 cards would be any better...