Creative now owns over 80 percent of the sound card market, with huge swathes of PC manufacturers fitting some kind of SoundBlaster card to their new PCs and many system-board makers fitting Creative's integrated sound chips. At the retail end, the top of the company's range of boxed products is the SoundBlaster Audigy Platinum, a six-channel card with all the trimmings.

It starts with Creative's Audigy chip, a new design claimed to offer four times the power of the EMU10K1 used in the SoundBlaster Live! range. It offers several new environmental audio functions, like Environment Morphing and Environment Panning, which means, for example, that changes between indoor and outdoor environments can be made more realistic.

The digital sound channels are now capable of 24-bit sound, which results in a signal to noise ratio of a full 100dB, better than many hi-fi sound systems. To handle the extra sound channels and to cater for full 6-channel output, the Audigy Platinum has a surfeit of sockets on its sound card and the Audigy drive, a module which fits a standard 5.25-inch drive bay on the front of your PC.

The sound card itself includes five gold-plated jack sockets, one of which doubles up, offering six connections in all. These provide six channels of output sound, suitable for reproducing Dolby Digital 5.1 from DVD soundtracks - the card itself does the decoding - and inputs for microphone and line. There's a digital output too and a 15-pin D-connector on a separate back-panel, which provides midi and joystick connections.

The final external socket on the sound card is for IEEE1394, or Firewire devices. This enables the connection of digital video cameras and can also be used as a fast network connection for games or home networking. It's up to four times faster than a 100BaseT Ethernet link and is easier to set up.

As if that wasn't enough, ribbon and IEEE1394 cables link the sound card internally to the Audigy drive. This module provides access for all kinds of audio from the front panel, including SPDIF in both phono and optical forms, auxilliary line input, second microphone and headphone links, as well as MIDI in and out and another IEEE1394 socket. There's an infra-red port, too, for the supplied remote control. Whether your interests are music, video or games, the Audigy Platinum is ideal for handling all things audio.

This must be one of the most comprehensive solutions for those interested in connecting hi-fi, video or music equipment to their PC. It comes with a host of software, including Cubasis, Storm, VideoStudio, MixMeister, SoundFont and Creative's own PlayCenter 3. Sadly, the only documentation is on CD - paper manuals have been dropped.