4. Decoder-Drivers

If you're familiar with a recent Creative sound card, you feel lost with the Audigy 2 ZS Notebook, since it uses most of the same operating modes and software as the vendor's earlier products.

You control the drivers via the Creative Audio Console software. Its various tabs contain all the adjustments you need; some are even redundant, since you find them on other control panels - EAX and CMSS, for example. A little rationalization effort needs to be applied to keep the user from getting lost among multiple accesses to the same adjustments.

Configuration of the card's operation is done in the Audio Console, which has several tabs.

Like Creative's other sound cards, the drivers accommodate Dolby Digital and DTS decoding, and there is a tab to make various adjustments for the decoders. You can either use the internal decoders or send the undecoded digital signal to the S/PDIF output to use an external decoder. Note that if you have a software DVD player that can handle decoding - which is frequently the case - you have to configure it in S/PDIF I/O to use Creative's decoding and use Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES (provided the DVD you're playing is encoded to these standards).

Creative's drivers handle surround decoding, unless of course you want to use an external decoder.

For Dolby, the configuration tab lets you choose the dynamic range compression. Contrary to what the panel seems to indicate, "Maximum" corresponds not to maximum compression but to no compression... Again a little rethinking is needed, this time of the vocabulary, to keep the user from scratching his or her head. You might also be surprised by the absence of Dolby Pro Logic II. Creative probably decided to leave that possibility out, thinking that its CMSS 3D system is a good replacement. On the other hand, the Audigy 2 ZS Notebook can obviously detect surround encoding and decode it in Dolby Pro Logic, which is very handy for sources like television or video cassettes, not to mention certain DVDs that are reissues of older movies, and even for some music CDs. For DTS encoding, the only option is ES decoding.

The Dolby decoder doesn't offer Dolby Pro Logic II, but Dolby Digital EX is here.

You can even use your laptop as a decoder for an external source!