Movie Quality

Getting out the popcorn and butter

Creative doesn't bundle a DVD player with its Audigy lineup, but it does include a whole suite of other useful packages. All the applications included likely make up the bulk of the Audigy Platinum's cost. Those who run out and purchase an Audigy Platinum or Platinum eX probably want to experience true 5.1 channel Dolby Digital surround sound in their desktop movies - for that the Audigy comes locked and loaded with all the channels they'll ever need.

Besides being true multi-channel ready, the Audigy comes ready to handle 5.1 channels with both analog and digital connections. The Audigy's I/O plate is home to a barrage of connectors for both analog and digital speaker systems. It has your typical front and rear stereo speaker jacks but doesn't have dedicated jacks for subwoofer and center channel. Instead, the Audigy uses the digital coaxial S/PDIF output for both digital and analog and provides the analog signal for the center and subwoofer channel. The Audigy does this by sending both low and high frequency signals through the jack. Since a subwoofer has a cross-over circuit that drops all signals beyond a certain frequency, there are no worries about reduced signal coherency.

Overall the experience was very good. We used The Matrix and The Gladiator DVDs and played them on WinDVD 3.0, which has the ability to decode DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1. The Audigy can decode Dolby Digital 5.1 at a driver level, but only does it if the digital S/PDIF is used (both optical and coaxial will work for this). While it's not done in hardware, drivers are low level and are speedier than applications that already sit on top of an OS. If a 4.1 channel setup is used, audio will be downmixed to 4 channels, but the Audigy does not create a virtual center channel. Audio accuracy and fidelity was tested using Creative's own DTT3500 Desktop Theater 5.1. Everything sounded as it should and all channels played back beautifully in both 4.1 and 5.1 speaker mode regardless of whether a center channel was used.

Speaking of Dolby Digital

The Audigy wasn't designed to encode Dolby Digital 5.1, but we think this is a feature that most would be okay without. However, it could be very well possible that Creative will release drivers that support encoding since the Audigy supports multi-channel recording in hardware. We'll have to see.