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Finally had the chance to retire my 4.5 year old single-core Athlon 64 FX-based system and move up into the world of Core 2 Duo for the right price. New system has 8 GB of RAM, and as such, moving to x64 was inevitable. Hence, I'm running Vista x64 SP1 on this new box.
Current Audio Setup:
SB Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
Klipsch ProMedia 4.1's
Sennheiser HD-570's
Long story short... Creative's support for the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum on Vista x64 seems terrible at best. Previously (ie: on Windows XP), I lived off of Creative's CMSS2 stereo upmixing support to power the rear speakers (with wonderful results!), but it seems that Creative's latest iteration of their Audio Console on Vista x64 has nothing of the sort except for straight CMSS, which leaves an awful lot to be desired in both rear channel balance capabilities, not to mention the exceptionally muddy sound that's coming out of this speaker set now for no good reason (other than it's Creative?).
Is this what UAA has brought to the table, or is this just Creative being up to their old tricks of craptastic driver & API support?
I'm looking for some recommendations on a sound card to replace this old Audigy 2 ZS Platinum. Caveats being that it needs to play nice with Vista x64, actually deliver quality playback over these ProMedia's like the Audigy 2 ZS did under WinXP and I would really prefer to have a card with the 5.25" break-out box in order to have front-panel volume access for my Sennheiser cans.
Asus, Auzentech, M-Audio, Creative? Who's actually offering EAX support these days along with quality audio playback capabilities? PCI or PCI-E, doesn't matter to me!
Current Audio Setup:
SB Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
Klipsch ProMedia 4.1's
Sennheiser HD-570's
Long story short... Creative's support for the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum on Vista x64 seems terrible at best. Previously (ie: on Windows XP), I lived off of Creative's CMSS2 stereo upmixing support to power the rear speakers (with wonderful results!), but it seems that Creative's latest iteration of their Audio Console on Vista x64 has nothing of the sort except for straight CMSS, which leaves an awful lot to be desired in both rear channel balance capabilities, not to mention the exceptionally muddy sound that's coming out of this speaker set now for no good reason (other than it's Creative?).
Is this what UAA has brought to the table, or is this just Creative being up to their old tricks of craptastic driver & API support?
I'm looking for some recommendations on a sound card to replace this old Audigy 2 ZS Platinum. Caveats being that it needs to play nice with Vista x64, actually deliver quality playback over these ProMedia's like the Audigy 2 ZS did under WinXP and I would really prefer to have a card with the 5.25" break-out box in order to have front-panel volume access for my Sennheiser cans.
Asus, Auzentech, M-Audio, Creative? Who's actually offering EAX support these days along with quality audio playback capabilities? PCI or PCI-E, doesn't matter to me!