[Ryan0619]

Hey, Latley I've wondering about sound cards and wondering how much they would improve the sound of my computer. Right now I have a Sound Blaster Live 1024 Digital Sound Card, Is this good enough for listening to music and gaming? I listen to Christian, a little Classical, and Audio stories (Old Time Radio). I realize headphones have alot to do with it but still... I am not really interested in getting a amp unless they are very cheap, like under $50. Any recomendations? Thanks!!

Ryan

 

[lan]

Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is a great upgrade from Soundblaster Live. The Live series is bad sounding because it resamples unnecessarily. If that's still too expensive, the Hercules Fortissimo III is nice.

 

[Eagle_Driver]

Quote:

Originally posted by lan Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is a great upgrade from Soundblaster Live. The Live series is bad sounding because it resamples unnecessarily. If that's still too expensive, the Hercules Fortissimo III is nice.

All consumer-grade sound cards resample 'unnecessarily'. But Creative's resampling method is suckier than most others.

 

[lan]

Resampling is possible via hardware or software (windows kmixer). The SBlive is via hardware so you can't escape it making everything 48khz. The other soundcards may have resampling in hardware but I thought they left 44.1 as 44.1 which is the important factor. The consumer cards may not be able to bypass the windows kmixer though. The pro cards have different modes to do that like ASIO and kernel streaming mode.

 

[fredpb]

Quote:

Originally posted by lan Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is a great upgrade from Soundblaster Live. The Live series is bad sounding because it resamples unnecessarily. If that's still too expensive, the Hercules Fortissimo III is nice.

Second those two choices.

I love my TB Santa Cruz. Talk about ease of installation. And does not have the problems that Soundblaster has with AMD CPU's and chipsets.

 

[Eagle_Driver]

I have a problem with a short section of sound repeating itself several times with my TB Santa Cruz.

It does that with some, though not all, of my games. And yeah, I tried every supported OS and every available driver version. I even turned off running apps. And strangely, those very same games sounded flawless on Creative sound cards!

 

[Ryan0619]

Well I don't play alot of games so that shouldn't to much of a problem. And this sound card is in my price range so I might end up getting this one. My only concern is I have a Dell 8200 Series and it has a headphone jack on the front of the tower. The only thing I'm worried about is hooking that up. Oh well thanks alot to everyone!!

Ryan