Home > Consumer Reviews > Creative Labs Audigy 2 and Inspire 6.1 6700 Speakers

I initially purchased this card on the strength of the DVD Audio credentials, plus the THX certification. I intended to feed a high quality 16bit DAC from the Audigy’s SPDF feed, downsampling the high bitrate/sample rate DVD-Audio to 16-bit/48Khz. I was disappointed to find that (as yet) there is no facility to downsample, the DVD-Audio only available via the line-out sockets.

However, I would say that even in 16 bit CD quality mode, through a high quality external DAC, this card is an audiophile product. The Audigy produces a rock solid, three-dimensional sound, which in many respects out-performs my £600 standalone DVD player (which uses the same offboard DAC). From an Audiophile point of view, it is only let down by a lack of absolute dynamic range, limited driver capability (no downsampling), and Creatives annoying habit of using cheap mini jacks for their socketry rather than decent phono sockets – this card deserves better. Nonetheless, I’d say this is the best prosumer card availably today, by some measure.

We suffered from the much publised 'squeal of death' with this product using XP pro - only hours of reseach and a total rewrite of the BIOS resolved the problem. The product claims to be as good as most top end hi-fi equipment sound-wise. For the money in a very small room it sounds good - but it will never match the quality of my studio quality hi-fi equipment. The card is good and my recomendation would be for this card to be connected to a series of hi quality amplifier/speaker systems. For the average buyer this respesents good value for money but is on the lower end of total sound quality.

I've always used Creative soundcards, because I think they work quite well.

Unfortunately, I've had so much trouble with the Audigy2 and the 6700 speakers that I returned them within a week of receiving them.

Firstly, one of the speaker outputs was defective, which meant I didn't receive any rear left speaker output. However, this would only have been really noticeable had the sound card itself worked.

The Audigy card made my WinXP PC freeze every 10 minutes and it would emit a high pitch squeel through the speakers. No end of driver re-installs would help. Even moving the soundcard to a different PCI slot hasn't helped.

I went as far as uninstalling the Creative drivers and installing some 3rd party drivers. This worked temporarily, but it required a lot of skill in setting the drivers.

I'm going to find an alternate 6.1 soundcard and speaker and i'm keeping my fingers crossed that it works with my Win XP PC.