🚀 go-pugleaf

      ...but have done a little research and am lookin to get this: CREATIVE
      SOUND BLASTER AUDIGY 2 ZS PLATINUM + BREAKOUT..




If you'd done a little research on this forum, you'd have discovered that if there's one make of sound device you shouldn't get, it's Creative. They have generally bad drivers, load your machine up with otherwise useless additional apps, and tell lies about the capability of their devices - and generally don't work too well as a result; Audition issues have been noted. Apart from that lot, they're fine...

You would be better advised to look amongst the cheaper pro cards (at a similar price point), and if you really want something from that stable, look at E-Mu. They were bought out by Creative years ago, but as well as producing a load of rubbish for the gamer-card company that own them, they also produce a line of perfectly acceptable devices with sensible drivers that work remarkably well.

And there are also several other manufacturers of acceptable soundcards as well, any one of whom will produce better devices than Creative. Check out Echo and MOTU for a start - and I'm sure that there will be more recommendations too.

Erik, the Audigy 2ZS Platinum will work fine as long as you're aware of the significant limitations inherent in the Audigy series hardware.

I've run Audition with 3 simultaneous Audigy 2ZS's, but that was a bit like bashing my head against a brick wall - it felt great when I stopped. But it _IS_ possible. Having said that... The drivers are the biggest letdown, but really only cause problems in multi-card configurations (Creative only ever wrote single-device drivers, and their code breaks badly depending on the motherboard type, bus type and speed, Southbridge chipset, and the wind direction on the day).

If you're looking to record from multiple sources, then the Platinum is by far the best consumer-level package available. The additional line inputs, SP/DIF I/O, microphone selection, level pots, second IEEE1488 port, and midi I/O is second to none. Nothing else comes close, unless you get into USB mixing packages.

If you're digitising standard audio (line inputs, good mikes, etc) then the Audigy will do fine. It only really gets into lies and BS when you try to digitise faster than the core processor likes, but if you keep it under 96k/24 bit, you'll be fine.

If you do choose the Audigy, here are the biggest problems :
1) The drivers are absolute garbage, plus they're OLD and have never been properly updated. They'll work on XP (32bit, 64bit with special Creative 64-bit drivers), but YMMV on Vista.
2) Don't install all the crap they bundle. All you need are the drivers, everything else can be controlled by standard mixer software. The only exception is the EAX console - if you're heavily into kiddie effects, then you'll need to also install the EAX console. Otherwise, leave it alone. That will drop your install from 16 packages and 40+ start menu items to 2. It's also faster (the full Creative package install can take up to an hour on a fast P4 system).
3) Don't expect the card to work seamlessly in a heavily used system. The PCI bus latency will cause problems, and the Audigy likes to do a lot of SHOUTING on the PCI bus whenever it's doing anything with data (even if it's not recording or playing!), and that can stop your system in its tracks (until the buffer catches up or the PCI bus times out and you get a BSOD).

I still use one Audigy so I can record from anything a customer gives me, plus play and/or edit any audio at any sample rate/bit depth when needed (the Lynx card I replaced my other 2 Audigys with works great but tends to get locked into various low-samplerate modes by unrelated system events). And I don't give a rat's whatsit if the digitiser/decimator on the Audigy loses 2 or 3 bits of resolution, neither I nor anyone else who's not dreaming can tell the difference in most real-world listening situations. In a studio or dedicated listening environment, you'd laugh at the Audigy - in front of a monitor with PC fans and USB drives and hard drives spinning, you honestly can't tell the difference.