What Soundblaster Card Should I Buy?

Question

$? Hello
I currently have a Chillblast Fusion Sidewinder Desktop PC (http://www.chillblast.com/product.php?productid=8737)?fitted with a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio?Card. I use my PC mainly for gaming and for music recording/production. The gaming side of things are fine though I have experienced lag on occasion when i really shouldn't have. The main problem is with recording audio. The mic is either too quiet to hear and if I do tweak all the settings, modes, launchers etc (i've trawled through them all!) i just get tons of static which isnt conduci've to a good recording.
So I want to get a decent new sound card. I have looked for reviews on the net and they're pretty sparse. If you guys could suggest a?great card?for Games AND Audio Recording that would be great.
Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

Depends on what card you currently own.
If you own an Audigy 2 or 4 I can't honestly say you wont get an improvement equal to the cost of the new cards.
I used to own an X-Fi but it got damaged so I had to plug my old Audigy 2 back in.
I can't really hear the blindest bit of difference. The only feature I miss is the simulated 3D audio for headphones - is that really worth the cost of the whole new card? I don't' think so.
If you're currently stuck with old onboard audio, then buy yourself one of the [url="http://us.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=209&subcategory=669&product=7 79">cheaper X-Fi'[/url]s, you'll love it. If not I'd wait. Also it's worth bearing in mind that in order to hear the difference you'll need speaker capable of producing high quality audio.
A lots changing since Vista regarding 3D sound. A lot of developers are starting to opt for a purely software based audio engines simply beause the vast majority of PC gamers don't know any different and stick with their motherboards on-board audio. So if you're playing a game using a software sound engine, your soundcard (whether it be onboard or not)? doesn't really make a great deal of difference.
Just play GTA IV and you'll see what I mean. It uses a purely software based audio engine and sounds absolutely stunning.
I can honestly I've never heard anything like it and it makes no use of my soundcard other than using it to send the audio to my speakers.
This is taken from the specs of a modern 3D games engine:
Sound manager:
? Fully spatialized 3D sound effects.
? Doppler shift and other frequency effects.
? High-precision sound travel delay.
? Atmospheric absorption effects.
? Reverberation with multiple simultaneous environments.
? Directional sounds with cone attenuation.
? Obstruction attenuation applied to direct and reflected paths.
? Frequency-dependent volume settings for all effects.
? Permeation system determines how far sounds travel through interiors.
? Unlimited streaming music channels with seamless looping and concatenation.
This is all done by your CPU, it makes no use of any audio hardware. Fairly ****ing evidence for the death of the dedicated sound card.
Unless Creative does something special, and more importantly useful for developers, I can see their soundcard department going the way of 3DFX.
It's interesting to see that they're buying into companies such a [url="http://www.ziilabs.com/">ZiiLABS[/url]
Maybe we'll see soundcards based around this kind of fully programmable tech, who knows. Maybe Creative's just moving on to other stuff.
Message Edited by Meocene on 07-03-2009 04:32 [email protected]