(There is a point to this rant after I'm finished) I recently purchased the Audigy 2 ZS for my computer, having been led to believe it is a wonderful sound card that will quite literally blow you away with its sound quality and the many other features and benefits it supposedly comes with. However, having bought it and installed it with all the updated drivers and whatnot I have had nothing but problems with it. Leaving aside the fiasco I had when it couldn't calibrate my 5.1 sound properly I gave it many chances to shine. First I tried music, the difference in quality is almost nothing. It is perhaps only slightly clearer but nothing mind-blowing. I almost prefer listening to my songs the way they were before because I was used to that rather than slightly different quality. I was disappointed but I was detirmined to be "blown away" by the "great sound quality" it was going to deliver. So I tried the F.E.A.R. single player demo, and surprise, surprise, no audible difference. EAX is a joke, my crappy old soundcard did just as good a job with EAX as the audigy.

Basically my point is, could I be doing something wrong here or is the audigy as big a rip off as it seems to be? Some among you may be frustrated at me because of my slander of the Audigy 2 or perhaps my lack of l337ness but put yourself in my shoes, you've just spent $189 on a sound card that makes barely any difference to sound quality and if you take it back for a refund you'll only get half of the money back or at the most, 3/4 of it back.