Sound Blaster Extigy announced

mstubble · January 8th, 2002, 03:22 PM

What? An external sound card??? Maybe I’m overlooking something but this does not sound very useful to me.

storm2k · January 8th, 2002, 03:24 PM

well it can be useful in plenty of situations.

say you have a laptop where you can't plug in a pci card.

or a crapmed system...

it might not be 100% practical, but uses can be found for it.

mstubble · January 8th, 2002, 03:30 PM

Yeah, I can see that, I have a feeling a sound card coming though a USB port really kills CPU usage.

storm2k · January 8th, 2002, 03:32 PM

well creative cards ALREADY kill processor usage. i think that this'd be more useful if they designed their dsp's to handle most of the environmental mixing and whatnot on card.

that would keep cpu usage down.

**Whir** · January 8th, 2002, 03:40 PM

The Audigy does do most of it's own processing I think. Side by side, and Audigy blew a Yamaha 4CPU DSP card away... I seriously doubt it was because the computer CPU was better. :P This thing will rock for all sorts of things. Sure, it's USB, I agree that sucks, they should've used firewire or even an 802, but USB2.0 is a good clip. This thing will rock for a portable soundsystem. Pack it up and bring it to your buddy's, plug it into his playstation and watch DVDs... $150? Well worth it IMO.

-Whir

skuz · January 8th, 2002, 07:03 PM

External sound card for laptop ?

Soon you'll see a guy in the bus using his laptop, sound card hanging to the right, wireless modem to the left, and he'll still call it a portable computer.

AnakiMana · January 8th, 2002, 07:36 PM

Just my opinion, but I think USB is more than enough for something like this. I mean, come on, how much bandwidth do you need for sound? Even the ISA bus was great for sound cards & network cards - cuz they don't need much bandwidth. And USB is IMO the best option they had, because it's more universal than anything else at the moment.

Now we just need an external video card using firewire, and any laptop could be transformed into a nice gaming machine!

AnakiMana

willy_ph · January 8th, 2002, 07:40 PM

IMO, the decision to use USB was a good one. Not every computer today uses Firewire, heck, I live in a dorm and there is only two people who have firewire, and thats because they own Sony Viao's. But to get back to my point, if you look around, probably about 85% of computers today have usb ports and if not, an expansion card is only about 20 bucks.

Firewire on the other hand costs roughly 100 bucks for a card.

Smart decision? I think so.

AuraEdge · January 8th, 2002, 08:33 PM

Just give me an external Geforceish card, and my laptop will be rockin'

I dont see much of a market for this kind of product either. The built in sound usually is well sufficent for headphones, which is what most portable users use. If your gunna be using a full array of 5.1 speakers, then whyd u buy a laptop?

**Whir** · January 8th, 2002, 08:59 PM

Well, for what I do, this thing makes sense, except that the relatively low speed of USB2.0 will bottleneck it. When recording digital into the S/PDIF or opticals, 12Mb/s is like, two or three tracks simultaneously. If it were firewire, it could handle quite a bit more and bit a bit more useful in laptop applications where you'd rather bring a nice quick laptop than lug around a complete box and monitor. I only have to bring two pieces of equipment for the computer part versus five. Well, that would be if it were firewire. If I had the money to drop on a digital mixing console, it wouldn't be a problem, but $3,500 doesn't drop out of trees these days.

-Whir