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One other point is that some sound cards are better for audio, others for gaming. My understanding is that :

- original SB and SB/Live clock at 44 KHz and are good for audio;

- Audigy 1 clocks at 48KHz and is better for gaming but not so good for audio because CD has to be resampled to 48 KHz

- Audigy 2 is essentially "best of both worlds" -- original SB performance for audio (+24 bit) and Audigy performance for gaming

Actually, that is not exactly correct. While you can "clock" (select the sampling rate) for the SB Live and Audigy to whatever you want, they still resample to 48 kHz to process and then resample it again to output sampling rate (if it's different than 48 kHz). This is just built in to all Emu 10kx chips, there is no way around it, as even high end cards based on the 10kx platform suffer from it (Emu APS is an example). The SB Live uses the Emu 10k1 and the Audigy uses the Emu 10k2, both of which are part of the 10kx family. The Audigy 2 could be different though, as I don't know what chip it uses.

By the way, the Audigy 1 is superior to the SB Live in all aspects other than its surround mixer. SB Live's surround mixer supported output in Dolby Prologic, so if you don't have 6 ch input on your receiver, you could still get surround sound. Creative took it out of the Surround Mixer for the Audigy and Audigy 2 because of lack of consumer interest in outdated technology. Neither of these cards are "good" at music, as M-Audio's Revolution 7.1, Terratec DMX 6-Fire, or even a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz are all better. Out of these, the 6-Fire would be the best, Revolution would come in as a close second, and the TB would be third, but still better than Creative's offerings. Would the differences be noticable? Aside from the sampling rate (which can be worked around in software as I mentioned earlier), not particularly.

If you intend on keeping an Audigy or Live card (or any 10kx based card, for that matter), I suggest getting the kxproject drivers... They aren't as good for games (only basic EAX 1 and 2 support and I am not even sure if they support the dead A3D standard), but they are better for music, as you can fully disable all DSPs with a virtual "map" of your chip and its inputs and outputs. Also, if you do recording, it supports ASIO like the big cards do .

EDIT: Apparently the Audigy 2 uses an Emu E-DSP. Sadly, though, that doesnt fix the nasty resampling problem.
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So, we award the Audigy2 the title of Audigy Service Pack1. This is exactly what we expected from the Audigy a year ago. However, this time we also do have some complains. The tests results indicated that 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz unswitchable resampling is still used.