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sound card advice.

S

Sage Osaka

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 28, 2006
Messages
422
not too sure if this is the correct place to come for this, but i shall try. sorry in advance for sounding like a noob, i really do read up on things more than it seems i do.

ive used an audigy 2 zs card for around 5'ish years, and it still works fine (to my knowledge) but is having more and more driver issues as everyone is aware of with creative products. with windows 7 64 bit and over 4 gigs of ram, the microphone is extremely distorted to a level where it is not usable.

so i thought what the heck, i'll just upgrade to a slightly better card. well it seems most cards that are in the direct next level upgrade range all use the same chipset that has most of the same problems, so maybe i'd just be in the market for a whole different model. well after looking around, it seems any quality card is starting to hit out of my price range, unless i can buy used (which i was doing over on the FS/FT board) but people mostly only sell creative x-fi products that i can seem to find.

so are there any recommendations? or anyone with a decent used card that is generally well received?

any advice is greatly appreciated, please and thanks in advance.
 
Do you have a budget? If you're looking for a change from the Creative Labs driver woes, you could give ASUS' wares a try. I've been extremely happy with my Essence STX, and the rest of their line lower down looks great. They all seem to have top notch SNR specs and I've never experienced a driver issue with this card.
 
Just going to repost something I posted a few days ago since it's relevant:

Well if your in the market for a sound card you really have 4 good chocies as far as brands go and then you just pick the model you want based on your needs.

Creative: Uses X-FI chips. Excellent audio in game, hardware acceleration, does a decent job of making low bitrate mp3 sound better (difference between sounding better and being more realistic, you still can't add detail that was never there in the first place). Terrible support hardware and drivers that butcher the potential of the chip. Much better sound quality can be had from other brands for the same price and without buggy and incomplete (features that is) drivers. However audio quality is still substantialy better than onboard.

Auzentech: Uses X-FI chips but with better support hardware and different drivers. Drivers still suck but aren't as bad as creative (in my opinion, some people think they actually suck worse). Provides better audio quality per dollar than creative thanks to better support hardware and a much larger set of useful features. Since it uses the X-FI chips you still get the hardware acceleration and excellent game audio with older games. Other brands still deliver better audio quality and features per dollar than auzentech though. And just like with creative many people have problems with their drivers and linux support is practically non-existant.

HT | Omega: Amazing audio quality and features per dollar. Amazing drivers with excellent support in all OS, even linux distros. However since they don't use X-FI chips you lose hardware acceleration and better audio in some of your games. They and ASUS are really the only two brands to offer great support hardware (that's what I call the PCB, opamps and all that jazz). Low quality mp3 will actually sound worse on these vs. onboard since these cards are so good that you will hear every single little flaw.

ASUS: Substantially better audio quality and features per dollar than creative or auzentech. However since they don't use X-FI chips you lose hardware acceleration and better audio in some of your games. Low quality mp3 will actually sound worse on these vs. onboard since these cards are so good that you will hear every single little flaw. Overall their features are superior to any other brand but audio quality and support hardware is still not quite as good as HT | Omega (close though). Their drivers are better than creative or auzentech but not as good as HT | Omega since many people have still reported having problems with them and updates and OS compatibility are certainly not as good as HT | Omega.

Once you decide on a brand then we can talk about specific cards. Your going to need to spend at least $80-90 to get a signifcant improvement and the type of audio card you need to get the most out of your speakers heavily depends on what speakers you have and how your using them. You haven't given me enough info about your setup yet for me to recommend anything to you.
 
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thanks for the posts guys. i'm using a pair of logitech z2300's (not that great i know) but i have a pretty decent set of cans as well (sennheister hd555's, and a pair of sony mdr-v700's) and not sure if i posted in my original post or not but am currently using an audigy 2 zs. any other specifics you need to know let me know and i will post.

over on the for sale/trade board there are 3-4 people willing to sell me a x-fi titanium fatality, x-fi platinum, and one person selling an x-fi xtrememusic, all ranging from 40-60 dollars, which is nice because it's cheaper than buying new and theyre still in almost unused condition. the thing is though, that x-fi uses similar drivers to that of my audigy 2 zs, and like i said in my original post that the drivers have major problems with computers that run on windows 7 64 bit and have over 4 gigs of ram. my mic literally doesnt work well enough to bother trying, which is the main reason behind this upgrade. but i also wouldnt mind having a better audio quality overall, especially considering i have a really old card and would probably would hear a decent improvement.

so if anyone has any information regarding the x-fi chips/drivers as they pertain to the widespread problem of windows 7 64 bit and > 4 gigs of ram, that information would be very helpful; as well as any further suggestions or advice. thanks again in advance.
 
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What are you using this for, gaming, music, movies?

I am surprised that someone who just said they were tired of having driver woes with their creative product is considering replacing it with....another creative product.

The way I see it you have a 50/50 chance of running into problems with a new creative card. Some people report having no issues with their creative cards while others curse them as a POS for their driver issues. I am one of those people who has been using an x-fi card for years on multiple OS (including win 7 x64 with 4 GB of ram btw) without any problems. However even I admit that creative cards have driver issues, I'm just lucky is all. Many people have speculated that all of the people complaining about driver issues have certain motherboards that are known to have problems with creative cards, however we don't have enough data to confirm this. It's been said that nforce boards in particular have problems with them but my last 2 boards have been nforce boards and I haven't had problems with either one so I don't know if these accusations are true. I do notice that for some reason a very large portion of those that report no driver issues with vista/7 have xtrememusic edition cards like me. It doesn't make any sense but for some reason it seems this card is more reliable with the vista/7 drivers, even more so than the new titanium cards. If your trying to buy a used card on the cheap then yes, I would recommend my card, the x-fi xtrememusic edition, just hope your not one of the 10% that have problems with it. However if your in the market you should steer away from creative cards unless your a gamer, since gaming is the one area that creative cards excel at over their competitors.
 
X-Fi also does hardware acceleration of OpenAL games, not sure how prevelant that is any more but it is an open standard that a lot of AA games have used in the past that I can think of, so the belief that hardware accelerated sound is dead isn't completely accurate...

I had an Auzen Prelude and a new HomeTheater HD both on an old nforce 5 (or was it 6, I forget now) series core2 board under both vista and win7 (both 64-bit), the HTHD is now on a X58 i7 board under win7 and I've had minor problems at worst back when the prelude was new, zero problems with the HTHD.
 
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