What is this??? Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit???

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: RedShirt
On that page that you linked to it says it does.... (Support EAX 4.0 Advanced HD)

Good catch, it might be a typo or something though. From the couple of LS reviews I've seen(not many people even want to review it), they mentioned that it doesn't, and all the Audigys(Audigii?) that I know support EAX4 have a special driver update on Creative's site; this one doesn't. *shrug* who knows?

 

[0roo0roo]

hm yea iVe seen the ls box, it said hd, not 4.0 i think. eax..eax 4.0...hd.. bleh, so much to confuse a consumer.

 

[RedShirt]

So this new card is just a LS that is stripped down then?

Edit: By stripped down I mean less connectors

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: RedShirt
So this new card is just a LS that is stripped down then?

Edit: By stripped down I mean less connectors

Very stripped down. The card is half-height this time, so a lot of capacitors and resistors have been removed. The gameport is also gone, along with a 4 pin internal analog connector. The jacks have also been redone, it's now down to 1 in, 3 out, with the analog input jack being some sort of dual-use analog/digital(SPDIF) jack that can do digital out, instead of a dedicated digital jack in the previous card.

 

[RedShirt]

Well, a friend is going to sell my an old Audigy 1 for 20 bucks. I took him up on the offer. It does the new EAX 4.0 HD with a driver update, has decent CPU utilization in games compred to the AV-710 and does 5.1 which is all I need. Plus it has firewire.

I think this is better than this Live! 24-bit.

 

[Algere]

EAX 4 is supported on the original Audigy?

I thought the Audigy 2 and ZS version were the only Creative cards to support EAX 4.

 

[Auric]

In any case, official support and what is possible are diff'rent things. The DSP is the same so in general all functionality besides connectors is software based.

 

[yhelothar]

Originally posted by: Auric
So with some extra messin' you can use a higher-end Creative E-MU card with an existing PC to achieve better sound quality than a stand-alone home stereo device for the same $200? Okay, but we're really talking aboot whether a $25 card is actually a quality alternative to a higher spec Envy24 on one hand (like an M-Audio) and an EMU-10K2 based card on the other.

Yeah, 44 KHz MP3's would be resampled but you wouldn't be using MP3's if all you cared aboot was quality.

I have not heard an AV-710, let alone compared it on the same system to a ZS so don't know but I suspect the anti-Creative mentality combined with its cheap price has more to do with its attraction than its quality.

I have nothing against creative, they make great gaming cards. But the chaintech is an unbelievably good deal. I bought one for a music card, and still using my soundstorm DD5.1 for games. I ended up completely disabling my soundstorm spdif completely because the chaintech sounds that much better. I was expecting the chaintech to sound worse in games. I completely underestimated this card when I bought it. The AV-710 is the best card hands down.

Surround quality will be acceptable for gaming anyways.