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Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS Notebook: Serious Audio for Portable Systems (page 4)

Category: Multimedia

by Vasily Melnik

[ 08/31/2005 | 03:20 PM ]

Feature Mode Selection Utility

Evidently at the users’ requests, this utility allows using the notebook’s own speakers to reproduce sound through the integrated codec, but this is not its main function. The user’s manual says that the Audigy 2 ZS Notebook audio card has two operational modes: Standard Feature Mode and Advanced Feature Mode. The advanced mode offers you the full set of functions like hardware EAX Advanced HD acceleration and support of high-resolution formats, but the card needs a lot of the PCMCIA bus bandwidth in this mode. The standard mode gives you just the basic functions (formats up to 24bits/48kHz and software EAX Advanced HD effects), but required less resources.

The following table shows how the two operational modes of the card differ between each other:

The user’s manual says the only reason for you to use the standard mode may be problems with the PCMCIA controller in the advanced mode and recommends the latter mode for most situations. But the mentioned problems do arise sometimes and I have to dwell upon this issue a little more.