[Icarium]

Howdy.. I recently stumbled upon these forums in an effort to find
out what was wrong with my sennheiser hd600s. After 4 loving years
the sound on the right had completely vanished... thankfully a simple
stock cable replacement fixed that right up.

Sadly, without much perusing, I foolishly upgraded from my old sblive
plat to the audigy 2 zs plat. If only I had spent a little more time
researching I perhaps would have gone the route of the emu 1212m.

Anyhow I looked through a few pages of threads but I was really
wondering what I could do to improve my sound quality. My set up is
something like the aforementioned devil card, hd600s and an old
headroom home amp.

I've read that the DACs on the audigy 2 are not great.. so perhaps
eventually investing in an external DAC would help shore that up?

Are there any settings or things I can do interanlly to improve things?
I picked up foobar2000 and am resampling to 48,000 etc.

Anyways, thanks in advance. I probably will have around 300-400 to
spend in the near future, so I'll budget fixes around there. I probably
will keep the audigy 2 as I do game a lot.

 

[NightWoundsTime]

nothing wrong with two sound-cards in one comp. Keep the Audigy for gaming and get a 1212m plus some mods and you'll have a decent source without getting into external DAC's.

 

[Mr.Radar]

The EMU and the Audigy don't play well together with the current drivers from Creative/EMU (Creative owns EMU and EMU is the "Pro" brand). An EMU Tech Support representative claims that a new driver release from EMU for the 1212m/1820/1820m series of cards will resolve the issues however EMU insiders say that tech support isn't suppost to make those promises. Right now the best option for you will probably be to get a Chaintech AV-710 (which has drivers that don't conflict with the Audigy) and either save up for the RME HDSP 9632 or wait until Creative/EMU resolves the driver conflict issue.

 

[Wodgy]

One immediate thing you can do is start upsampling your music to 48kHz in software. This is easy to do in a player like Foobar, and it gets around one of the main complaints people have with the Audigy series of cards. If you Google around for a file called "udial.ape" (or "udial.flac" or "udial.wav") and try it before and after the change, the improvement in sound quality is very easily audible. Also, unlike sound cards from every other manufacturer, the master volume for the Audigy series should be set to 50%, not 100%, if you're using an external amp. Otherwise you get clipping. The "udial" test file will also show this.

 

[Icarium]

Ah thanks for the responses. I have been doing the resampling in foobar
which has indeed fixed much of the distortion in the udial file, however
there was the ambulance style distortion w/ wave out... perhaps due to the
100 percent master volume so I had set the output to directsound 2.

I should probably test waveout with 50 percent sound before writing this post
but yeah that's what I'll do next.

Thanks again