Creative Extigy

If you enjoy watching DVD movies or making music with your notebook PC, you'll have realised that options for upgrading the sound capabilities are limited and prohibitively expensive.

The Creative Extigy is a classy looking external sound card that attaches to notebooks or desktop PCs using a USB port.

Like any normal sound card, it can be used for playback and recording of audio but it's an external device rather than a plug-in expansion card.

Installing PCI cards can be fiddly so, by comparison, rigging up the Extigy using a spare USB port is an absolute breeze. Once plugged in, it's a simple matter of installing the software and plugging the speakers in.

The unit itself is tastefully designed and comes with feet that allow it to stand on one end if space is an issue.

In terms of sound performance, the Extigy is very good indeed. One reason for this is that it's based on Creative's top of the range Audigy sound card. This means it's very well suited for games and music playback, but the real selling point appears to be its unrivalled connectivity.

The Extigy is packed with every audio connection you'll need. On the back of the unit are analogue and digital connections for 5.1 surround sound speakers, Midi in and out ports for attaching a Midi keyboard and S/PDIF in.

On the front panel there is an optical in and out for hooking up MiniDisc players for recording digital audio. To finish off the ensemble there are microphone, line in and headphone inputs.

Aside from the standby button and controls for adjusting the level of the audio signals, the only button on the front panel controls the Creative Multi Speaker Surround facility.

In short, this takes normal stereo music and interprets the signal for reproduction on 4.1 or 5.1 multi-channel surround sound speaker systems.

The Extigy also functions as a standalone Dolby Digital decoder without a PC in sight. Plug your set-top DVD player into the Extigy and you can listen to Dolby Digital soundtracks in glorious 5.1 surround sound. It will also do the same for Sony's PlayStation 2.

Previous incarnations of Creative's PlayCenter software have left a lot to be desired but this latest version harbours some innovative touches. It has a built-in audio cleaning feature that removes scratches, pops and hisses when recording from cassette tapes and vinyl.

If that wasn't enough, once your audio is safely recorded you can then tinker with it via its Dynamic Repositioning of Enhanced Audio and Music tool that allows you to set any stereo audio track to create a 5.1 surround environment.

Other features include a time stretching facility that allows the user to either speed up or slow down audio while still maintaining the pitch and reverbs to recreate the echo in different environments.

The fact that most of the features can be controlled from the included remote control is just the icing on the cake.

Our concern was that the Extigy wouldn't be able to transfer the information quickly enough via USB to be convincing. In fact, our tests showed that the Extigy fares better than many normal PCI sound cards on the market.

Although notebook users will benefit most from an Extigy, even desktop PC owners looking for a simple upgrade should consider it.

Price: £140 (inc. VAT)

Contact: Creative
www.soundblaster.com

Also consider: Edirol UA-30. £179.