Soundcards

LeHah

LeHah

212 Squadron - "The Old Man's Eyes And Ears"
Howdy all!

I'm just about ready to buy myself a new PC. If I'm lucky and tighten my belt a little more, I'll be able to order it in two weeks time - give or take how much RAM I decide to put into the machine (1 Gig? 2 Gigs?)

Anyway - I've done all my research that I need to do - but I can't seem to find any reviews on soundcards! This is the last thing that I need to figure out and I have two choices:

Sound Blaster® Live! 24-bit ADVANCED HD™ Audio

Sound Blaster Audigy™2 ZS (D) Card w/Dolby 5.1

I'm sure Audigy is a better system to have but I guess I'm just looking for people with more experience in this than me. (I'm also looking into a sound system - I'm leaning toward the Dell 5650 5.1 Surround Sound Speaker System though I might be in the market for the diesel Klipsch Promedia Ultra 5.1)

So - Anyone? Google didn't come up with anything.
 
My motherboard has a buildt in soundcard. It's the best one i have ever had. It's some sort of sound blaster/roland crossover.
 
I would buy the Sound Blaster Audigy™2 ZS (D) Card w/Dolby 5.1, but it’s only a suggestion. I don’t know the first soundcard you mentioned but the second I do and can tell you it’s good.
 
If your looking for a 5.1 or 7.1 system, the obvious choice of the two you list is the audigy 2 zs (same card I have) but if you want to fork over more cash you could opt for an audigy 4. Basicaly if I understand correctly it has better eax processing for truer distribution of sound in 3d games. . (By the way Half-life 2 sounds absolutly incredible on the audigy 2 zs with 7.1 speaker set-up.)

As far as speakers go the top two sets are the Klipsh promedias or Creatives Gigaworks. I'm not sure if There is a 7.1 set of klipsh but gigaworks comes in 7.1 or 5.1 (5.1 is upgadeable to 7.1) . I have heard there are some wierd power issues if you use creative speakers on non creative cards.. (dont know if true or if reverse would be true: non creative speakers on soundblaster card) However if you have a hometheater setup already you could use the digital output and let it do all the work.

As far as the speakers go they are supposed to be comparable. It would just depend on your taste. The Klipsh supposedly has a truer high end, where a lot of people prefer the bass on the creative set. Both are thx certified I think.

The logitech set that is thx certified is supposed to be ok too.
 
Dyret said:
My motherboard has a buildt in soundcard. It's the best one i have ever had. It's some sort of sound blaster/roland crossover.
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I'm not familiar with Dyrets sound card but there are a few issues to be aware of with built-in cards, same with built in video cards.

Some built in cards dont actually have their own memory. They use the system ram for loading samples. Others don't actually have an on board processor, just rom chips full of instruction sets, etc.

This might not make any difference with say DOOM 3 as that game is written to use cpu for sound. That game would sound just as good on a cheap built-in as an expensive card with full acceleration for 3d sound etc. Other games like Half-life 2 make use of any beefy hardware you have, The result is that you may actually have performance benefits using an audigy 2 for example as there is less load on your system ram and CPU. The difference would be noticable in the frame rate (although it may be slight).
 
Thanks for your helpful input, AD. Do you think I should "chance" getting the SB Audigy with the Klipsch speakers - considering what you just told me?
 
From what I can tell there shouldn't be any problem running Klipch Promedias with the audigy. I think the problem is using cerative speakers on other sound cards... If you are looking for another non creative sound card option, maybe look into Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Supossedly its very good and as supported as creatives stuff.

Once again, I keep reading about people buying klipch to hook to their sound card and they say it sounds great, so you should be safe if that's the route your going to take.
 
If the price difference between the two isn't anything great, get the Audigy2... I dont think I've spoken to anyone recently who doesn't consider it the pinnacle of consumer audio right now.
 
You most likely won't be able to find a "Turtle Beach Santa Cruz" anymore. I didn't half a year ago.
As for the Audigy/Live - depends on what you want to do. The Audigy is the better card except for DOS (it just won't work there). The advantages are pretty much restricted to EAX and a better noise ratio. So you'll probably only notice a difference in some modern games and if you are a music professional. However the ZS isn't really all that much more expensive either. Just stay away from Platinum and Co.

PS: My personal preference half a year ago when I had the same decision to make was to either get the "Turtle Beach Santa Cruz" or the "Hercules Digifire/Hercules Fortissimo III" because both offer superior backwards compatibility then either creative card. I was unable to locate either however so I settled for the Audigy 2.
 
It depends on what you're wanting to do. If you want to compose music, the Audigy/Live are the worst you can get - everything is resampled due to the way the DSP works (plus the consumer-level DACs on a high-end sound card... there are cheaper pro-level sound cards with better analogs). I think I spied the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 for far cheaper than an Audigy 2 ZS. The former is basically the lowest low-end pro sound card you can get. (Note: Creative does make high-end soundcards, but under their E-mu name, and they're hard to get).

For gaming, the Audigy is what you *NEED* because they have EAX accelleration. None of the other cards will have as much EAX accelleration as the Creative cards do. Sure they emulate it, but it hogs CPU cycles.

A good compromise would be to get a lower end Audigy2 for gaming (face it, they're all the same except for trivial little features), then a USB or Firewire audio card for the important audio stuff. This has the side benefit that the things that need clean audio will get it, since they're located outside the noisy computer case.

Or if you can wait, Creative just announced a Audigy 2 with Video Editing feature, which has a slight advantage that the DTS and Dolby Digital decoding is done in hardware rather than software... should be in stores within a month.
 
Interesting post, Worf. I doubt I'll dip into the world of composition but I do have some professional software, some of which thanks to some good people from Boston.

But I just need the card and speakers for DVDs and gaming mostly.
 
The Audigy is certainly better, it's compatible with more recent games.
And on another topic, on-board audio is a lot better now than it was in the past. nForce chipsets have some good audio. My Live 5.1 started giving me headaches, loud bursts of static and crashing the machine at startup. I removed it and enabled the nForce 2 sound, voilá, all is well now. It has 5.1 support too.
 
Edfilho said:
...on-board audio is a lot better now than it was in the past. nForce chipsets have some good audio...
Click to expand...
Agreed. Intel's Azalia initiative has encouraged many motherboard manufacturer's for both Intel and AMD products to include fairly high quality 8 channel (7.1) codecs integrated on to the motherboard instead of the old AC'97 codec and unless you have an interest in prosumer audio production (M-Audio products have been mentioned -- Terratec also make a similar product in this price range) a recent 8 channel integrated codec should suffice for most gaming requirements (these should support EAX1 and possibly 2). nVIDIA's SoundStorm is a good 5.1 codec with hardware Dolby Digital Encoding (DICE) and EAX2, but is limited to the nForce2, which only supports AMD Socket A CPU's (Thoroughbred's, Barton's, Socket A Semprons).

If you want full EAX gaming support above EAX2, then only a Creative Labs products will suit, as they haven't yet licenced the tech to any other manufacturers AFAIK. Although I have an nForce2 motherboard with Soundstorm, I am still using my Hercules Game Theatre XP, mainly due to the nifty external rack, which amongst other things happens to have a game port for my trusty Flightstick Pro joystick :D The Game Theatre is quite old (released mid 2001) and only supports EAX2, although this path (EAX2) is still widely supported in many games as one of the fallbacks for non Creative cards and the card and drivers are very stable.

I've been rather disappointed with Creative's products over the past 4-5 years -- since they bought out Aureal, who were making some really innovative products with their Vortex range, Creative have continued to release incremental, overpriced refreshes with proprietory API's and continued to strongarm the games industry at every opportune moment (c.f. the belated id Software Doom3/Creative "accommodation"). Hopefully nVIDIA will release a discrete SoundStorm successor some time in the future that challenges the other players to produce a more revolutionary product.

Cheers,


BrynS
 
Thanks for the history lesson BrynS. So, as we see it, there should be no problem with me playing WC games using this sound system (as long as I do what it takes to get them to run on WinXP)?
 
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