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Recommend a sound card please

U

unimatrixzer0

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 22, 2004
Messages
322
I believe what I have now is an Audigy 2. Now while I don't game really, by brother likes to play games like Battlefield 2... basically games in that category. Anyways, right now I basically have my Logitech Z-5500 hooked up with the green, black and orange cables, or I guess analog. I'd like to go from that to just using 1 cable either with the optical or the coaxial I think its called?

I've read some reviews on sound cards before, but that was a while ago and basically the only thing that kept me from switching to something else was the mention of EAX version whatever? not having the best support in sound cards besides Creative and EAX being mainly used in games. Basically the most I use my speakers for is watching tv and DVD's, but I'd still like whatever sound card I get to have decent support for games since my brothers also uses my computer for gaming.
 
You won't get surround sound for games through one cable unless you go with the Auzentech X-Plosion or the X-Mystique.
 
Thanks for the suggestion. Hmm, I'm looking at the specs to both cards on newegg, but I can't see what makes one card $45 more then the other. The specs look identical to me.

Edit: Ok, so it seems this DTS Connect is the only difference between the two cards.
 
Possibly. I believe the X-Plosion has less distortion and all that (for you - no insult here) irrelevant stuff. Both have Dolby Digital Live real-time encoding.
 
Anyone with an nForce4 chipset having any problems with the Auzentech X-Plosion? I saw a review on newegg where someone was complaining about static and noise because of the nforce4 chipset.
 
so you're wanting to switch soundcards just for less cables..??? :confused:

NEAT FREAK!!!! lol j/k j/k .
 
lol, not really. Thats part of the reason, but mostly for the coolness factor of using an optical cable. That and I figure watching DVDs would sound better on my speakers then with what I have right now.

I wonder why Creative doesn't have optical out on their sound cards. I mean besides that module that takes up a dvd drive bay. Seems kind of inconvenient having an optical cable coming from the front of your case, only to have it loop to the back of your desk again to get to the inputs on your speaker control.
 
No offense intended, but the Z-5500 isn't capable of resolving the differences between such a short run of analog and optical.
 
An X-plosion won't diaspoint. I switched to one because I was fed up on runnig 6 cables from my creative cards. You can get an M-audio card aswell that has coax output
 
It depends what matters to you, I'd say:

Get X-Fi for
- great sound at music and movie playback,
- fully hardware accelerated audio with all EAX 5 effects,
- precise surround sound over regular headphones in games.

Get X-Plosion for
- "coolness factor of using an optical cable for games" (you really got this right, unimatrixzer0 ;)

X-Plosion differs from X-Fi in this that it supports encoding multichannel streams into DTS.
Some people like the idea, I don't because encoding is bound to introduce latency to the signal. Perhaps this won't be noticable to some people. It was noticable to me with sound storm and its hardware dolby encoding. If used for analog connection both X-Fi and X-Plosion cards can decode Dolby and DTS. I know my X-Fi does this in hardware as there is no CPU hit, I am not sure about the other one, perhaps this is done same way, perhaps in software.

As for nForce4 chipset some - not all - of its implementations - under specific circumstances - might cause problems with any PCI sound card - due to PCI bus traffic management limitations.

The bottom line is sound is analog and our ears are analog. Conversion has to take place somewhere and speakers are, and always will be, connected with a plain wire to the amplifier of some sort. If you have good digital to analog circuitry on the soundcard digital connection only makes things more cumbersome and what matters a lot - more expensive - to me.
 
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