[Piccolo Daimaou]

My reasons aren't important at the moment, so I'll skip right to the point. What would be the optimal settings for the Audigy 2 ZS? I'm going to be using foobar and kernel streaming, but I'm not sure if I should set it up the same way that I did the Chaintech (in regards to output data format and resampling).

And I know what some of you might be thinking, but trust me, there is a good reason for this.

 

[Mr.Radar]

With the A2ZS my setup guide for the AV-710 would work right (except for the driver settings of course), though instead of the stock creative drivers you should use the Kxproject (Google it) drivers and ASIO instead of Kernel Streaming.

 

[Silanda]

I would set it to 24bit padded to 32, resampling to 96000Hz. You could set it to 48KHz, I'm not sure if there is any difference in sound quality if you are only playing back 44Khz stuff.

 

[Mr.Radar]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Silanda I would set it to 24bit padded to 32, resampling to 96000Hz. You could set it to 48KHz, I'm not sure if there is any difference in sound quality if you are only playing back 44Khz stuff.

Actually, on the A2ZS you can get 24/96 bit perfect but not 24/48 (it's always downsampled to 16/48).

 

[Piccolo Daimaou]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr.Radar ...instead of the stock creative drivers you should use the Kxproject (Google it) drivers and ASIO instead of Kernel Streaming.

Why the kx drivers and ASIO?

 

[Mr.Radar]

The Kx drivers because they're better than Creative's drivers and because they support ASIO and ASIO is more stable than KS and it's naitiviely implimented on the Kx project drivers.

 

[Piccolo Daimaou]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr.Radar The Kx drivers because they're better than Creative's drivers...

I gathered that you felt this way, but what makes them better? Is it the ASIO support or something else? I've never had any trouble with kernel streaming. I just used it because it was more convinient than downloading the ASIO plugin and trying to get that to work right.

I hate to be a nag, but I'm just too curious for my own good.

P.S. According to the kX project website, the drivers don't fully support the Audigy 2 ZS. With this in mind, wouldn't it be a bad idea to install them?

 

[ogewo]

I've been running the Kx drivers with my Audigy 2 ZS for a little while now and they're working fine. Tons of features compared to what you get with the Creative drivers, assuming you don't want to install the bloatware that comes with the Creative drivers, which you don't.

Unfortunately I'm not sure if the quality has improved. Foobar will only do 16bit/48khz playback with Kx drivers verses 24 padded to 32bit/96khz with kernel streaming and Creative drivers. The Kx ASIO control panel does not allow me to change any options either, the same with ASIO4ALL with the Creative drivers. I'm guessing this what the Kx site means when they say the Audigy 2 ZS is not fully supported.

Not sure if this happens to everyone though, could be a fluke.

EDIT: clarified that kernel streaming worked with higher settings for me.

 

[ixeo]

play...doom

 

[maarek99]

From what I understand the Audigy 2 and the ZS should be capable of 32bit/48 khz using Kernel Streaming. But not with ASIO.

 

[ogewo]

Yup, thats the case for me. I'm taking a break from games though so it's time for an EMU.

 

[Piccolo Daimaou]

Yet another question as regards to setup. In foobar, should I mess around with the volume control? I'm worried about clipping and I'm curious as to whether or not this will help prevent it.

 

[Mr.Radar]

It will help prevent clipping if the signal clips while it's being processed by Foobar2000 or the soundcard's drivers, however if the recording itself is clipping the volume control will not help reduce that. Instead of the volume control for the sole purpose of reducing clipping I reccomend ReplayGain, as it automatically adjusts the volume of each track on-the-fly so they're about the same volume and the files themselve aren't changed (except for a few tags added), plus it's a indicator (though an unreliable one) of how badly compressed (dynamically) some albums are, -8 dB and under is where things really start getting bad.

You can enable Replaygain in Foobar under the Playback preferences. ReplayGain has two modes: track and album. In album mode, the "album" gain (or the average gain of all the tracks on the album) is used, so the tracks are just as loud/quiet relative to each other as they would be without ReplayGain, while the track mode uses the individual ReplayGain values for each track, meaning they'll all be about the same volume. To add ReplayGain tags to files, select the files you want to ReplayGain, right click, and select one of the options from the ReplayGain submenu.