SB Audigy: how bad IS it?

Bongo Fiend

New member
I have had a SB Audigy Platinum for around a year and I'm already rather dissatisfied with it. I mainly use Cubase SX, with lots of audio tracks, a couple of external synths controlled by MIDI, and a few audio sources going into the soundcard, routed to independent tracks on Cubase with realtime VST FX applied.

Good things about the Audigy:
(i) 2 MIDI ins and outs - so I can control my synth module and my keyboard independently.
(ii) 2 independent stereo inputs (as well as the line/mic in on the back of the card) so I can route all 4 of my synth outputs to independent tracks, with different effects, in realtime.

Bad things about the Audigy:
1. I've never managed to avoid sporadic clicks when recording audio, particularly when recording from several channels at once, but even when recording a single channel in Cubase. I've tried various latencies, both native and ASIO drivers, etc etc.
2. MIDI timing is poor when playing back lots of audio (this is despite disabling ACPI as everybody suggests, reducing IRQ sharing by moving the soundcard to a different slot, changing MIDI-versus-audio prioritisation in SX, etc). The only way to improve it seems to be to get rid of most of my audio channels!
3. Every time I seek support from Steinberg or from their user forums, my soundcard gets the blame. Steinberg just say "the first thing you should do is change your soundcard". All SX users seem to turn their noses up and refer to it as a gamer's card, which is odd since it has loads of audio connectors on the front drive-bay panel. Is it really so bad, or are Steinberg too lazy to get Cubase to work well with the Audigy?
4. I have to admit that there are some distinctly shoddy aspects to the Audigy, e.g. the drivers have very poor support for any sampling rate other than 48KHz, which is a bummer since all my old songs consist of 44.1KHz samples.

Has anyone else had the same experience with the Audigy?
Is it to blame for my problems?
Am I really better off getting a new card?
 
(bump!)

So has anyone else had problems with the Audigy & Cubase?
I have no problems doing basic recording with other applications.
 
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