I have not heard an Audigy 2 in action, so keep that in mind.
I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, and it's an excellent card.
Big high points:
- Excellent line quality, better than any offering I've heard from Creative Labs.
- Versajack, particularly if you like headphones as much as I do. Being able to have your headphones and 4 channel speakers plugged in at once without messing around with cords for a switch is nice.
However, while Sensura 3D is really nice positional, particularly in headphone mode, it's not nearly as ubiqitously supported as EAX, and while the drivers for this card do support EAX as well and it does provide some 3D surround, my feeling is that the Audigy 2 probably outperforms it in that regard.
If you want good music, or DVDs I highly recommend this card, that is if you are looking in the range of basic consumer sound cards. There are really expensive high-end cards that will definately outperform it in line quality, though they likely lack significant 3D surround at all.
All in all if you want a card for great music/DVD playback that will do pretty well in games and not cost you too much, I'd recommend this card. I quite like mine.
But at the end of the day if gaming audio is your primary concern I'd probably lean in favour of an Audigy 2, even though I haven't heard it myself.
I dunno how they are considered these days, but back when I was looking for a replacement for my crapped out (and rather old) first gen (4 channel only) SBLive Value Philips had a line up of really great sound cards, their top teir 5.1 card called the Accoustic Edge was an excellent card with both SPDIF input and output without any kind of breakout box.
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