Recommend Sound Card

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Octave

Gawd
Joined
Aug 27, 2004
Messages
662
I need a sound card thats comprable to the soundstorm. Good ol' soundstorm, how i miss thee. Anywho, main things is spdif out....(possibly in too)...7.1 analog out capable..and of course...the DD needs to light up on my reciever so its all snazzy :)
 
I just upgraded from an onboard ALC850 to the Audigy 2 ZS, holy crap what a difference in sound quality. I haven't had a real chance to test it. Just played a little CS:S and I could hear behind me with clarity. I have the Logitech 5300e.
I got it here
Pretty damn good deal. But you're gonna have to get the drivers and software yourself.
 
M-Audio Revolution 7.1

Better qual sound than the A2-ZS and has an RCA SPDIF socket. Also, has better drivers and higher qual recording.

Depends though, if its for gaming, get the A2-ZS cause it has more hardware accel so you wont lose any FPS. If you dun ming losing a few frames for better sound, or your a music kinda person then get the maudio.
 
If you're looking for dolby digital encoding like the soundstorm does, you have very limited choices atm. The X Mystique 7.1 is the only one available (in limited quantities) right now - review here. I think Mad Dog announced a similar products in the last few days as well. None of the creative cards can do dolby encoding - they can decode fine, and pass through dvd audio etc, but will only send the front stereo speakers via spdif from games so you'd be stuck with pro-logic.

The flipside is that the creative cards have better game performance because of hardware acceleration like EAX, so it's a toss-up. You can get 6 or 8 channel sound to your amp using analog connections if you want.

If you want the absolute best audio quality, the Envy24 based cards are most recommended, and pretty cheap at about $30. The M-Audio Revolution seems to be the most recommended of the bunch, but again, no Dolby encoding.

I'm not even going to comment on drivers - some people hate creative drivers, but I'm not sure what kind of support you could expect with the X-Mystique or Envy24 cards either.
 
What about the creative X-Fi, this should be out shortly and it will be another processor which someone will find a way to overclock!
 
so_cal_forever said:
The new Turtle Beach Montego apparently uses the same chipset, so it can do DD on the fly as well for $20 cheaper.
Click to expand...
A lot of cards use the cmedia chipset and claim DD encoding on-the-fly (via software! don't be fooled like i was! ;) ) but the drivers haven't materialized after 2 years of promises. I totally consider it false/misleading advertising.

Unless turtlebeach has come out with a spankin new card in the past month (?)

Otherwise it's still Soundstorm and the Mystique, despite Cmedia's claims to the contrary.

Edit: ignore everything i've said, apparently there is a new turtle beach card called the Montego II DDL and it's going to retail for $79.95. Buy.com already has it for $67 shipped.

Darn and i just recent bought two audigy 2 cards. I would have bought one of these instead, thats if it can deliver as promised.
 
I highly recoment the HDA Mystique 7.1. Good sound quality, DDL, optical and coxial digital connections, component connections, optional expansion card and breakout box on the way and it sounds much better than soundstorm IMHO. I bought it about a month ago and have no regrets. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting on another DDL card. Hell it took months for the mystigue to actually make it to retail here since the first announcement that it was to be released. Also as far as i know there will be no soundstorm2. I was under the impression that they had canceled it's production/developement.
 
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