What's the difference between diff. sound cards? Performance?

[yata]

I think Sound Blaster Live is overpriced when one can get a decent card for twenty bucks. Other than 4 speaker support, CD-in, digital out, and bundled softwares, is there an audible difference when simply playing music? Sound quality better? or CPU load less? Anyone care to shed light? I'm about to order a no-brand card with Yamaha chipset and Win2k support for 20 bucks shipped. Just thought I'd bring the topic up.

 

[SuperGroove]

although I haven't installed mine yet, I bought mine because I hear that Soundblaster Live's support and compatibility are second to no soundcards. CPU Load is definitely less, and that's ALWAYS a plus. Also...though some A3D cards sound better in some cases...I think System stability is much more important that quality. However, the SB LIVE! doesn't sound bad at all

 

[Rigoletto]

Well if you're buying a budget system then ultimately who cares about real quality?
But the SBlive! series has its own processor at about 166MHz or something, which reduces CPU utilisation, and the quality is better than most cards. I have the full version of the card and it's better than my Ensoniq ESS1868 which sucks for sound quality.
SBlaster do have the best compatibility for those DOS games. Allegedly...

 

[Modus]

The majority of modern PCI sound cards made in the past two or three years will have a signal-to-noise ratio and frequency response range high enough for all but the most demanding professional applications. So as far as sound quality is concerned, a $10 card today will sound just as good as a SoundBlaster Live!

The real reason the Live costs $50 is its feature list: 3D positional audio with EAX and A3D. Many soundcards today are taking the winmodem approach, and offloading some processing onto the CPU, but the SoundBlaster Live has its own DSP which can handle most of the work. Even so, the cheaper cards are a much better value, as many of them can emulate EAX and A3D with decent CPU utilization.

Oh, and you shold ignore any spec dealing with "amount of simultaneous MIDI voices", for instance, SB PCI 64, PCI128, etc. The fact is that MIDI's are all but obsolete for today's applications, and they never used more than 16 voices to begin with.

Modus

 

[Chuffmaster2k]

Just FYI did a search earlier on the SBLive Value OEM. You can find them for as cheap as 36+shipping on pricewatch. Good luck in whatever you decide.