does a sound card make a difference?

[003]

I've never touched vista.

 

[EricB]

If you are looking for gaming features, hardware acceleration and widespread support, creative is almost the only way to go. If you are looking for good sound quality, steer away if possible, especially the Audigy line.

M-Audio and E-MU make great sound cards in terms of sound quality. If you need more features, the Auzentech cards are not bad.

not again.

please don't start this mess back up. in your opinion, soundblaster audigy isn't good for for sound quality.

you were right about one thing. about m-audio sounding better, but not all m-audio products. I had 2 m- audio products (the pre usb and the firewire solo) that sounded just as good as the audigy card. but the m-audio audiophile 192 card blew all three cards out of the water as did the presonus firebox.

the reasons had nothing to do with what you were talking about either . the latter 2 card were better because they had better signal to noise ratios, they didn't clip at max volume (the audigy clips at 75 to 90 percent of it max volume ) and they had more output voltage

they both had 4 volts opposed to maybe 1 volt for the audigy. this is most likely the difference that you heard, if you did hear any difference. to almost everybody in the the world "louder is better" even if you couldn't tell the differences when everything set at equal volumes

my thing is all of that extra voltage is good for turning your amp volume (gain) lower which will always improve system noise and headroom


so yes there are cards that sound better than the SB audigy (I'll give you that one. I can admit when I'm wrong). but by the same token you can't say that the audigy is a bad sounding card

Newcents05, Yes vista isn't suppose to support hardware accelaration which is bullship

 

[003]

I know not ALL m-audio cards. When I say M-Audio and E-MU I really mean the Audiophile 192, the E-MU 0404 and E-MU 1212M. I'm not saying the creative cards are plain BAD, because they're not. They are the best you can get for games and compatibility and hardware acceleration, etc...

The reason I so dislike the Audigy line is because the dsp always resamples everything to 48khz, so unless you are listening to material that was already recorded at 48khz, you can never get bit perfect output, which is very annoying to me because I use an external DAC. The x-fi does not do this which is why I give it the nod.

 

[NewCents05]

well since vista doesnt support hardware acceleration that takes down the creative argument

 

[EricB]

well since vista doesnt support hardware acceleration that takes down the creative argument

I don't expect that to last long. too many people will complain about that

 

[003]

Then again, how many people just blindly buy vista and thats not even counting the fact it will come pre installed on every new computer.

I'm sticking with XP.

 

[NewCents05]

i had a bad disc of xp so i couldnt justify spending the same amount of money buying xp when i could get vista its not that bad really i like some of the features it has but on the other hand i have to update some of the drivers cause vista crashes with the xp drivers

 

[Oreo]

About good sounding cards and bad sounding cards. It just depends what your used to. If youve been stuck with Mobo SOund for a while a SB Live card will sound brilliant, but if youve previosuly had an X-Fi Extreme something or other its gona sound terrible. You dont have good and bad sound cards, its just personal preference from what your used to. I think the SB Live card is brilliant, simply because i havnt herd audio off a better sound card for pc's.

 

[EricB]

if you want hard acceleration in vista go creative. it has this one thing (I forget what it called. I will look it up tomorrow) that most game support so it will use hardware acceleration in vista (even though vista doesn't support it. it is the only way to get it in vista)

 

[Crysalis]

are you thinking of EAX?