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Hrmm...Sound Card Decisions....

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yeah I have to agree with Pariah here (probalby the only reason I haven't gotten myself an AE yet) processing music can do weird things.

CDs and what not are two channel, you want 4 channel sound just duplicate it to the rears. You'll the more immersive feel but you won't get the processed effect.

I'm not a big fan of QMSS for music.

For 2 channel games and DVDs yes, for music no.
 
Neither of you have heard it it yet...it is amazing. I wouldn't think it would do a good job, but it does. You really must experience it. There are some types of music where it is not desirable, but in most cases it does a very good job. The best application is in DVD's. I actually had a DD decoder that I sent back because the QMSS was much more pleasing, it was much more effective than true DD. It sends much more information to the rear channels than true DD does. You must remember that DD was developed mainly for the large movie theater setting where too much signal to the rear speakers would not be optimal, but in a smaller home theater enviroment it does wonders. Also, future driver releases are supposed to allow the disabling of this feature..
 
After reading this thread for the last week or so, I made my decision based on only two things. First off, the card must have Linux support, so the AE is out. Santa Cruz is 'supposedly' supported, but we'll see. Second was the sound quality issue. Almost everyone agrees that the Live is one step below the Cruz and the AE. Since I primarily listen to music with my card, it seemed obvious that the Santa Cruz would be the best solution as I didn't need the Live drive, but I did need some sort of splitting mechanism (for my Sennheiser HD 570 headphones). Currently I have only an analog receiver to hook up to the card so I'll see how good the sound qaulity is. Thanks for all the opinions.

On a sidenote, I personally don't like any 'positional audio' effects introduced into music. Mirroring has the best effect on the sound quality. This comes after extensive testing with my good friend's Home Theater system (5.1, all Harman Kardon and Velodyne). It just doesn't soudn quite 'right' with any positional effects. I will be trying out the QMSS to see if this implementation is actually decent.
 
Thanx for everybody's input. I believe I have decided to go with the AE, that is unless someone who has this card and the Midiland 8200 Dolby Digital 5.1 Speakers has some specific issues I should know about. 🙂
Thanx again all.

Daris
 
i agree with insane3d - i thought the qmss might end up being really strange or tacky, but it works well

unfortunately, stability is more important to me so i cannot use the card
(actually, i just heard that new drivers were released yesterday so i'll try those out first and give an update if anything changed)

memnoch: are you interested in buying a week-old acoustic edge?
 
From 3dsoundsurge (RE: is it true that you are unable to disable QMSS????)

It's true for internal digital sources but in the case of SPDIF input (including CD-digital) and analog sources it can be enabled or disabled. Only one digital (SPDIF in or CD-digital in) input can be active at a time period and one analog input can be selected for QMSS application at a time so when it comes to CD-Audio easy to not have QMSS applied. To have it just come from 2 speakers for any source is also easy - just select 2 speaker output but QMSS can't be disabled in favour of stereo x2. Can't say this for sure but it would seem like something Philps could add if there is interest.
 
I did a bit of analog testing this morning on my speakers. 2 speaker setup first. My initial impression was, wow, the Santa Cruz does sound significantly fuller and better than the Live. So much so, that I thought something was wrong. Which in fact there was, I had the EQ enabled on the Cruz while the Live was on a fresh installation and no tweaking. Whoops. After setting everything back to the defaults, the 2 setups sounded very similar. The Cruz did have slightly crisper highs but it wasn't dramatic. Where the Cruz collected brownie points was on sound tweaking. Once again the EQ made it much easier from me to get the sound I wanted, where as the Live's bass/treble adjustments are quite crude and difficult to guage. After tweaking, the nod definitely went to the Cruz.

The 4 speaker results were pretty similar with a few differences. The Cruz does a simple channel duplication to the back and nothing else. On the otherhand, the Live does some sort of adjustment. It's kind of hard to explain w/out hearing it, but when you switch speaker setups, the sound is not a duplication there is definite change to how the music sounds. It seems like Creative made automatic "EQ" adjustments depending on what your speaker setup is. Also, at times it sounded like there was an echo. It was as if the front and rear weren't in the proper phase and the backs were a bit behind the fronts. Might be another Creative adjustment, or me just hearing things, I don't know. The ability of the Cruz to adjust F/R balance is a plus. I remember the original Live having this ability at one point, I don't know what happened to it though.

I think the Cruz does have better audio capabilities, but I think the nature of music on the computer and crappy multimedia speakers don't play to its strengths. The better your sound system, the more you realize how bad MP3's sound. CD quality MP3's, even 320kbps, are not CD quality when compared side to side with the CD. I compared a 320kbps MP3 to a superCD, and the difference was truly dramatic, there was much more going on in the SuperCD. Until a better compression/format comes around for PC's, I don't think the sound will ever really be that highend.
 
"Let's say that you don't like QMSS when playing music... Can you disable it, and just get mirrored audio?"

At this point in time, the only way to disable it is to choose 2 speaker output. Philips supposedly will be coming out with a QMSS disable options in the near future along with some other features. QMSS can be disabled for SPDIF, DVD's, and any line in source. So, if you are listening to a CD via the CD cable (SPDIF or Analog) you can disable it. The only thing that can't be disabled is music played over the PCI bus like MP3's or using the digital playback option of Windows Media Player, etc. I mostly listen to trance, progressive house, etc, so I prefer the QMSS. If I am listening to some rock or jazz for instance, sometimes I listen without QMSS..it really is on a song by song basis. Also, QMSS does wonders with classical music...I sometimes catch myself looking over my shoulder..

 
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