hi,
i have been recording with soundblaster live and now audigy 2 zs. I like the card itself because of the midi synth and s/n ratio. I am not impressed with the converters and or it's 24/96 wdm driver.
In sonar producer 3, at 24/96, the driver detunes and alters the sound with live input, no matter how you set the buffers, and the cakewalk profiler makes mistakes at generic setup of this driver. samplitude 7 likes the 24/96 wdm but latency is terrible with input monitoring. vegas 4 likes the wdm driver. sawstudio 3.3 likes the wdm driver but will not use the asio driver because of a uneven power of 2 devisor error...spent hours crawling through the windows registry to fix this as creative asio panel will not let you control this setting....result...nothing found! logic and cubase sx like asio driver, no complaints if 16/48 floats your boat.
what I'm getting at here is that with all the hours I have spent setting this cards drivers to work with my software correctly, I could have easily afforded a delta 1010 that would have done a better job with the exception of midi.
my conclusion is that creative writes very poor driver software for it's products and does not try to help the recording musician that they advertise the card for. example: audigy 2 zs platinum is targeted at musicians and also quite costly, why not just buy a delta.
an alternative to this driver madness is the kxproject at
www.kxproject.com. they have been working on wdm and asio drivers for a while now and offer a much better product for the recording musician. their drivers and mixer are free and updated on a very consistant basis.
kxproject does not support 24/96 yet but will very soon...maybe even on the audigy 2 zs ( about $89.00 US ). creative says this card will not record at 24/96 with the asio driver like it's platinum bigger brother. which by the way will not either, not really ( read the small print ), but the kx developers think that they can make the $89 card perform up to platinum specs with the new asio driver. kx made asio possible on the live series when creative refused and turned to gamers as the target market.
cheers,
baba