Creative Audigy 4 Sound Card

Former staff writer - December 10, 2006

Installation

Well installation is pretty easy, simply open you case, ensure that you have a spare PCI slot to plug this card into. Remove the I/O cover, pop in your new sound card, and secure to the case with a screw. Once that is done, you can close up your case, and proceeds to plug your audio gear into the card. Boot up your computer, install the supplied drivers and you are ready to roll!

Testing

Test Setup:

AMD AM2 4200+
ASRock AM2NF4G-Sata2
2 x 1 GB Generic DDR2 RAM (667Mhz)
2x320Gb Sata 2 HDD’s
Enermax 600Watt Noisetaker
Creative Audigy 4
Windows XP Professional
Latest Creative Soundcard Drivers

For testing this soundcard I chose to run RightMark Audio Analyzer, it auto generates a test signal, then analyzes that signal when replayed through the card, and gives out results. For the audio enthusiast this is great but for most it will leave scratching their heads, I will also provide my own (selective) sound thoughts of this card.

RightMark generates some nice graphs with the outputs so without further ado, here are the results:

Noise Level, dBA	-97.8
Dynamic Range, dBA	97.7
THD, %	0.0003
IMD + Noise, %	0.0037
Stereo Crosstalk	-98.7
IMD + N (Swept Freq.), %	0.0039

NOISE LEVEL GRAPH:

The lower the Noise Level is better, this card demonstrates, about -130Db, where as the theoretical limit on a CD is only -104, the solid -130 from this card throws it right up there in performance already.

DYNAMIC RANGE GRAPH:

Dynamic Range, is basically the diffrence between loudest, and quietest. This graph shows that the diffrence is not that much, except for a breif spike at 1000 Hz, though this is acceptable, as that was within the test range.

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