Laptop sound card upgrade: Audigy 2 ZS Notebook or Audigy 2 NX?
 

I'm going to give my laptop an upgrade on the sound front, and I've narrowed the list of possible hardware down to the two cards mentioned in the thread title.

Creative.com offers a product comparison list, which shows some differences between the two cards. The Audigy 2 ZS Notebook has support for features such as "EAX ADVANCED HD 4.0", "ASIO Low Latency Multi-track Recording Support" and "THX Certification", although I am not sure about the significance of either of those, especially not the latter as THX has no tangible definition. Sure, sure, the movie theater THX introductions are fancy, but doesn't it *really* just involve cranking the volume up really loudly on some serious high-end speakers?

One reason for me to pick the Audigy 2 NX (USB 2.0) is that my PCMCIA slot (which the Audigy 2 ZS Notebook version uses) is already occupied by a WiFi card. However, I'll choose "better" sound over my WiFi card any day of the week. But is the ZS Notebook sound (192kHz) compared to the NX (96kHz) really that much better?

So, any help would be greatly appreciated.

A copy of the product comparison list can be found at:

http://www.zelaron.com/gear/Comparison.htm

Not sure if this review will help you or not,
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mul...udigy2-zs.html
At the end, he mentioned as a downside, that the card wasn't compatible at first with two of the four laptops it was tested in.

Thanks for the link, it was very helpful. :)

I suppose the incompability is to be expected, as there are only two types of PCMCIA sound cards so far. I've ordered an Audigy 2 ZS Notebook from overseas, so I'll let you know how it works out.