Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE sound card

Worked Great ! ! ! for approx. 90 seconds when running iTunes, Real Player, or WMP.

Purchased mine at BestBuy and brought mine back and exchanged the Audigy SE for a Dynex 5.1-Channel PCI Sound Card. I saw this card had a ViA chip the same as my MoBo. The Dynex has worked great for 3 days now, and I've had no problems at all! I thought about getting the X-Fi Xtreme card. But I went with
the Dynex card which had the ViA chip and also had the same download site ViaArena.com as my ViA MoBo.
Unfortunately for me My MB has a ViA chip that I have found does not seem to run well with the Audigy SE Card!
I had trouble loading their drivers, I did not want to start reloading Windows, Flashing My Bios, or updating my MoBo drivers.
As Creative web support suggested. Creative also made it very difficult to find their customer service Phone #.

So on the (+) side
1. The Audigy SE did sound a bit better but I only had about 90 seconds to judge.
2. And I also liked their equalizer that the Dynex did not have.

On the (-) side Creative lost a quite a few points from me along with this card rating for the following reasons.

1. It did not work with my Via Mo Bo.
2. They had No support phone # with box.
2. No Support phone # at Creative.com website.
3. When the Creative site said 60 day free phone support!
4. Then I thought I had found their support # when I saw an 1-800 support # on a site that was selling it!
But NOOOOO!
5. They gave me another # to call!!! And it was not an 800 # of course!
So I gave up looking and just brought mine back to BestBuy and picked up the Dynex card.
6. They had no live online tech support.
7. The online tech support they do have did not have my problem listed either!


Was going to give the Audigy SE a 7 rating but now that I have thought about it I have to give it a 6 and to Creative I give a BIG THUMBS DOWN!

I use this soundcard primarily as the audio output for a computer simulation of a theater pipe organ. An Intel i7 Quad Core using sample sets of 1/2 gig powers the application. Many people who do this use very advanced cards such as the LT1010 in order to get 10 channel output. I just use two channels, but the soundcard runs through a high end EV amp and PA speaker system, so it has to deliver top notch input to the amp. I dare say that this system rivals the sound of $100,000+ commercial instruments I have heard, although I do not play it at auditorium levels. There seems to be little or no intermodulation distortion among the hundreds of individual signals mixed as the organ is simulated pipe by pipe. I have taken direct samples of high end commercial organs and transferred them to my playback system and believe it or not these samples sound better through my sound system than in the original! The Creative suite of software such as EAX brings the sound alive, and the ability to use Soundbank Manager and especially Vienna makes the overall package very satisfying. As it turns out, the Audigy SE is just the tip of the iceburg, the addition of other Creative products make for a great overall package. I'm glad I discovered it.

I've got this card for several monts now.Got it for around 30$(in BG).I'm using it with HiFi headphones,and souds quite good.The sound is clear and accurate,without any noticeable distortions or noise.I've done some tests with Right Mark Audio Analyzer 6.1.0,and the results are good-low distortion,high dinamic range,low noise.Even better than some expensive cards.The software bundled is rich enough-EAX console,Equalizer,Wave Studio,Recording...etc.Performs EAX in some games,like POP,but others just won'e enable it no matter it supports EAX 3.0.That was for the original drivers in the bundle CD.Installing drivers for Audigy SE from Creative's oficcial website makes it sound poor,however it enables EAX in most apps.Whatever,for games you should buy an X-FI,but for music this one is just fine.