Goodness, did we really do 9 pages already? Okay verdict time, first the one liner: The best got a little better for sure.

If you own any card of the Audigy series it however is not necessary to upgrade at all. The differences are so minor that from a consumers point of view you will not hear the difference. If you are in the market as a professional user and preferably need to record in high quality, well that might make a difference.

The cons. Where is real-time Dolby Digital encoding? By now Creative should have introduced this feature. I have connected everything optical here where possible, yet when I play a game and want 5.1 sound I have to convert back to traditional wiring. We are in 2005, even NVIDIA's Sounstorm solution offers it. It's a real pity that that this is not introduced just yet. Secondly PCI Express is getting big and very common. If you want to be a leading manufacturer you got to have the first Audigy out there that can handle PCI-Express 1x.

Last thing, driver support. In the entire history of this site people have been complaining about Creative drivers. People needed small updates to solve small bugs, yet driver updates often pass 6 to 12 months before coming available. I really hope that Creative will listen a bit more to the audience and react to that.

That was basically all I have to bitch about though, as the Audigy 4 once again is a really fine product. Consumers will love it and from a hardware point of view it is 'the' product that I personally like to have in my gaming rig. Superior pure audio quality is what this product will offer you, combined with a really nice set of software and of course for gamers the extensive set of EAX features make this a fantastic buy. The card has more features than any other manufacturer, EAX 4.0, 7.1 channels, Dolby ES and DTS-ES, special Advanced HD effects for amateur musicians, stable drivers and next to that it offers very high quality analog and now digital output.

The high quality that Audigy 4 offers makes it a very versatile soundcard, whether it's gaming, 24-bit recording or even using the card as home theater solution for sound it is fantastic as you'll have lossless multichannel audio and everything from way too many channels Dolby Digital to DTS decoding is within your grasp.

From a consumer point of view, the only thing that can compete with this card is the Audigy 2 ZS, making this a very fine piece of hardware. The Audigy 4 Pro is therefore highly recommended.

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Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro