"Best soundcard ever" I paid about £50 for this product, and its the best money ive spent on my computer, which by the way is a AMD Athlon XP 2500+ with around 384 mb ram. Its really smooth. its controllable through the remote, which through key file configuring can be made to control any program. The software may be poor, but i use iTunes and its a dream, cmss with my 5.1 sounds beautiful. if your passionate about music then this is for you. From Oliver Perks, January 08, 2005
"Best soundcard ever" I paid about £50 for this product, and its the best money ive spent on my computer, which by the way is a AMD Athlon XP 2500+ with around 384 mb ram. Its really smooth. its controllable through the remote, which through key file configuring can be made to control any program. The software may be poor, but i use iTunes and its a dream, cmss with my 5.1 sounds beautiful. if your passionate about music then this is for you. From Oliver Perks, January 08, 2005
"Extogy Problems" I used this product fine for a while, but after i reinstalled windows again, i had breaks in the music i was playing, every 10seconds or so, it would go blank for a millisecond, as if it muted for a split seccond, it is very annoying. Neone know y ?
From Roberto R, July 10, 2003
"awesoem product!! Creative sound blaster usb" The person who didn't like this, for sure didn't know how to use it. Now maybe the software can be more together in the same place, but I am sure he did not adjust all the great filters and sounds iteams it has. I adjusted my music till my Klipsch THX sounded as great as a five thousand dollar surround system. This product is awesome if you know what your doing, but for someone who just wants to press any button like some nimrode with out reading of course it will sounds like crud! So if you like to read and full around with all kinds of buttons to make your music, dvd, or tv sounds great, you are going to love this product.. Plus, how can you complain for a usb plug and play iteam that none does better?... Buy it, you will like it. If you get stuck, mail me, I will read for you.. lol.. Enjoy! From Rico, December 07, 2002
"Brilliant Concept, but poor software implementation" One would be impressed to see a robust set of i/o ports and the idea of being a USB device is brilliant. However, I do not recommend this product to anyone. The volume control has no stops; meaning, the knob turns infinitely so you don't know when you've hit the min or the max volumes. That seems to be the only h/w flaw.
The s/w is an absolute joke. 5 different s/w packages were included, and all were developed differently. The install procedures for each of the packages are inconsistent with one another. One package may ask you if you want shortcuts, while another does not. One package asks where you would like to have it installed, while another does not. There is also functionality overlaps between these utilities.
Now I can live with all those flaws, however there are more serious flaws that render the product unusable and impractical. For example, one of the players has a dependancy on a software tool that is not included. This tool expects the user to have internet (a requirement not stated on the product) and it expects the user to download RealPlayer 7 from the web. Furthermore, RealPlayer 7 is no longer downloadable. The only thing similar to RealPlayer that is downloadable today is RealOne, which has user authentication problems.
The software that lets you record from something like a CD player to a hard drive expects you to create an online web account on some site. It's absurd to be forced to sign on to a web page when the user is attempting to do something locally. I went through the hoops of creating an online account anyway. I signed on so I could record from CD to hard drive. The extigy did not send a signal to the computer even when I verified that I was sending a signal to the extigy. Perhaps that is an isolated defect, but all other defects I've observed were certainly design defects.
In addition, the volume control is very slow in updating the on-screen volume level, and never did actually change the volume. Then when I ran all the uninstall procedures so I could return the equipment, not everything was uninstalled. There is still a Creative Labs popup screen when I boot.
Overall, the software has a very poor design that renders the product useless. From Justin Gombos, February 25, 2002
"Sounds good, but kills system performance" Creative Labs deserves at least some credit for this product. The drivers were rock solid (even on Windows XP, which for a cutting-edge soundcard is extremely rare right now). They were perfectly stable, easy to install, and all the features worked flawlessly. The sound was great in both music and EAX games. The hardware itself is pleasing to look at and the quality of the construction seemed suprisingly good.
But, there seems to be one MAJOR drawback. Once installed, everything on my system slowed down by about 50%. Framerates in all of the games I tried were cut in half! It was extremely noticeable and for me, totally unbearable. As soon as I unplugged the Extigy, performance was back to normal. And the system I installed it in is a dual Pentium III 800 with 512MB RAM, so system resources was not the issue. If I had to guess, it probably has to do with the USB connection. 12Mbps apparently is just not enough for the Extigy to keep up with demanding applications on a high-performance system. For the life of me I just can't understand why Creative Labs went with USB 1.1 instead of USB 2.0.
To summarize, it's a great buy for someone who wants the best in sound (from a PC), but isn't planning on doing anything demanding with it.
For me, I had to return it and have it exchanged for the older, but higher performance, Audigy. From Dan, February 22, 2002
We're currently upgrading our user review system; so we won't be accepting new reviews for now. Sound Blaster Extigy Specs
Interface(s)
Original USB
Released date
September 2003
Platforms
Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP
