Header banner
Revain logoHome Page
Quvarious Evans photo
1 Level
520 Review
0 Karma

Review on Creative Blaster Audigy Performance Headphone by Quvarious Evans

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Native Linux support. hardware information. Sale.

Basically a variant of the Sound Blaster Audigy 2, except it uses a PCIe slot instead of PCI. Works great on latest Linux/ALSA versions with built-in snd_emu10k1 driver. It was automatically detected and activated without additional driver installation. I believe reviews claiming this doesn't work on Linux must have been submitted years ago, before the driver was updated to recognize the card, or with older Linux installs. Now it works. Tested on Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10. It's one of the very few modern sound cards with built-in hardware mixing. This means multiple applications can play audio at the same time, even with an ALSA-only audio configuration. No need for sound servers like PulseAudio or the delays or errors that come with it. Linux users please note that if your motherboard has its own sound device, it may remain the default device even after you connect a sound card like this. . This means your apps will continue to send sound to the motherboard. So if your speakers are connected to the card, you won't hear anything. Some applications allow you to choose which audio device to use. It would be better to set Linux to use the card as the default device. One way to do this in Ubuntu is to add the following line at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf: options snd slots=snd-emu10k1, I give one star because of the fixed 48000 Hz. internal sample rate and clipping issues that are present in all emu10k sound cards. People listening to music or playing games won't notice or notice this, but it's important for those recording or processing audio. It's also annoying that Creative Labs doesn't officially support Linux *yet*.

Pros
  • Looking forward to
Cons
  • The list is getting long.