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Best Sound Card on Market right now!

Unfortunately now that Aureal's deceased, I give that title to Sound Blaster Live 1024 OEM. I hate Creative Labs to the bone, they're the prime example of the lazy king of the hill with no one to kick them down. However, SB Live 1024 OEM is a great card, especially for it's price. I paid $50 for mine, and this was months ago here in Finland where hardware is relatively expensive.

Don't be fooled with "SB Live Platinum edition(s)", "Live Gamer" or "Live MP3" and other Creative marketing crap whip-ups like that, all are just the basic Live card with different software package and differing output connectors.

Unless you really need a digital output or the bundled software, SB Live 1024 offers everything it's two to four times more expensive counterparts without luxuries like printed manuals. But who needs 'em anyway 🙂
 
I'm pretty impressed by the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz 5.1 card.
The SBLive! is the standard and is supported everywhere I dont' know if it's the best though...get an SBLive! Value new version...
4 channel analog output, and with a converter you can get 6 channel creative miniDIN OR (different converter) RCA SPDIF output (2 channel PCM or 5.1 dolby digital) from the digital mini jack.

The philips acoustic edge 5.1 looks extremely good....I can't wait for it to be released.

You know nVidia is working on a soundcard to right? they have a lot of Aureal's engineers and a much larger captial base, that could be an interesting project, but nothing yet.
 
Sound Blaster Live Value excellent and inexpensive. You can check on Pricewatch.com for who has the best prices. Probably can snag one for Between $40 and $50, maybe less.

You might want to consider the Diamond Monster MX300; they are still in stock at a few places and have even better positional sound than the SBLive. I grabbed mine for $29 mail order by searching Pricewatch.com looking under the Diamond name. It uses the Vortex 2 chip of the now defunct Aureal, but it is still and excellent card. You can download the last Aureal Vortex 2 drivers and use them instead of the crappy ones which are shipped from Diamond with the card.
 
Another vote for SBLive 1024 value,I`m sure sometime down the road there will be better cards out from other companies but for now the SBLive is a safe bet & excellent value for money.

🙂
 
Dulanic:

it was Sensura for there Sensura3D postional audio, since they can't use A3D because creative owns it. Even if nVidia has 3/4s of Aureal's engineers they still can't use Creative owned technology.

Or did you mean someone else? I still don't know who will produce these cards for nVidia (maybe Guillemot?), or did you hear an announcement on who will make them?
 
If you're gonna consider the MX300, please look for the Aureal SQ2500 first. It's got an updated Vortex2 chip and other benefits over the MX300. I picked up my SQ2500 about hrm.. 6 months ago for $41 to replace my MX300.
 
I recently picked up a Santa Cruz card, after owning both a SBLive and an MX300.

I can safely say that the Santa Cruz kicks their @sses.
 
Yes, nVidia did higher most all of Aureals top engineers, and while they may venture into the sound card business (we could only hope they did as well as Aureal did, and then some), their main focus will not be put towards sound because they did not get the winning bid for doing sound in the Xbox -- which is where half their focus is, as well as the newest video cards.

I however love my SQ2500, just wish it worked in win2k w/ the KT133 chipset 🙁
In windowsME/98se, it kicks major booty! 🙂
 
a nice card if you can find it, on the vortex 2 chip is the xitel storm built in fiber optic out, and if you find the gamers pack version of it that comes with force feedback head phones!! , but i only found mine in some places rma stuff area, so better to search for the turtle beach mentioned above, (yeah the turtle beach 5.1 if i needed a sound card now i'd get it)or if all else fails go for any of the live cards, their software that comes packeged with their stuff stinks, (not the games the stuff they make) but the hardware is ok
 
I got the Santa Cruz right about now and it rocks. I'd get the SB Live Platinum because it comes along with Live drive2 and a Remote. Did I mention Unreal tournament, Deus ex, Theif2 and MDK2. I still think that I'd keep the Santa Cruz though since I think that sound quality is better than the Live.
 
I am not sure which cards are the best, but I do not reccomend SB lives, I have one and it pops and clicks like CRAZY, and it is driving me frigging mad, I read that this happens a lot to people and it seems that sblive crackling is a large topic of discussion on this forum... i have tried every measure save RMA'ing the damn thing to no avail, tweaked with hardware settings reseated the card, tried diffrent drivers, even placed it in every damn slot my motherboard offered. oh well I'll be purchasing the next decent copetitor's card out there unless creative comes up with a fix.
 
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