SBLive! vs. SB AWE32 (old cards) sound quality.

[SOS]

Hi,

Is there actually any sound quality difference between the new SBLive! cards and older cards like the AWE32? For playing waves and mp3s, etc?

Thanks

SOS

 

[NicColt]

The AWE64 is one kickass card. Why SB never made a pci version of it is beyond me.

 

[DaveJ]

I had an AWE32 that I replaced with an SB Live Value last year... the difference in sound quality is amazing! The AWE32 was noisy as heck, and the Live is dead silent. With the AWE there was a constant background hiss that the Live does not have... This is most likely due to the fact that the Live does not have an amp on the card, but that shouldn't matter if you have powered speakers...

Dave

 

[JonJon]

i went from an sb 16 ISA and the difference was awesome, i couldn't believe how much better the sb live was....go for it....

 

[TimeKeeper]

Am I the only one here still insists on ISA AWE64?
Still insists on single IRQ occupy device?

 

[j00]

i had an awe64 gold isa in my puter. just put in a sb live value and it's 10x better, cant believe i paid 170$ for that old isa bastard when it came out compared to 38$ with this one. then again prices have dropped in general...sb live is much better imo.

 

[Erasmus-X]

<< Why SB never made a pci version of it is beyond me >>



Funny you mentioned that, because Creative did produce the AWE64 PCI as an OEM part for a while. Even with all of the advancements that the Live! cards have made, I still miss my AWE64 Gold ISA a LOT. I really liked the fact that it had its own onboard memory (mine was upgraded to 16MB total with an expansion module) for Soundfonts instead of using host RAM. The only reason I stopped using it was because of ISA slot limitations. Go fig....

Back to the main question, there are number of differences in sound quality between the AWE cards and the Live!.

The AWE64 series were essentially the same cards as the AWE32s with some minor modifications (the &quot;64&quot; actually comes from the number of voices it can support through the included software synthesizer; it still only handled 32 voices in hardware). The Live! upmixes all source signals to 48kHz with 8-point interpolation before outputing them. The Live! also supports true full-duplex operation. The AWE cards claimed to have full-duplex support but realistically (due to its drivers), it was only half-duplex. The Live! has a programmable DSP that is capable of accelerating up to 32 DS3D streams. In contrast, the AWE series provides no 3D sound acceleration. Finally, the AWE cards used 4W amplified preouts. The Live! cards delete this in favor of improved sound quality (no amplification present to distort the output signal).

With all of those advantages the Live! has though, the MIDI output on my AWE64 Gold still sounded better for whatever reason. Several other people will probably tell you the same thing.

 

[compuwiz1]

The SB AWE64 Gold was the best ISA card they ever produced. It is still a good card for those who still populate the ISA bus, but............not quite as good as the Sblive.

 

[pen^2]

wow, it wasnt just me thinkin awe64 had better midi than live!

 

[dukdukgoos]

Yeah, the MIDI output was better on the AWE64 Gold than the SBLive! I guess they figure MIDI isn't as important as it once was...