Soundcard which ones are good

[Starvinmarv]

I have been having problems with my sound recently, it's not my speakers as i have bought a new pair, i've messed around with all the settings and nothing makes a difference, it sounds very echoey like the sound is coming from miles away.

 

I am considering buying a reasonably cheap soundcard, i have seen some soundblaster live sound cards going on ebay reasonably cheap but i don't know what they are like, what ones are decent and fairly cheap to buy?

 

Cheers.

[Dozey]

You wont go wrong with Creative Sound Blaster sound cards.

[Guest]

Ahem, haha, erm depends what you mean by can't go wrong Saying that I haven't had any of the issues with Creative drivers which so many people seem to.

 

If you're after sound for games then yep, I'd definitely agree with Creative, I think they're the only ones that do hardware EAX so will gain you some FPS in games which is always useful.

 

If you're after sound quality they're not the best as everything gets converted to 48KHz and there's nothing you can do about that as it's done in hardware. But if it's just computer speakers you may not be able to tell...especially if you're using analogue.

[alchresearch]

I've got a soundblaster Live card for sale. It also comes with the "live drive" front panel for headphones and things:

 

http://www.gamepc.com/images/labs/platinum-livedrive.gif

[alkatraz]

Although people will always argue to the contrary, mostly due to small niggly issues, or specific examples of something going wrong (which every manufacturer has).. there are certain companies that are the pinnacle of quality for a particular piece of hardware:

 

CD/DVD Drives: Plextor

CPU Heatsinks: Zalman

Power Supplies: Enermax

RAM: Corsair

Keyboards/Mice: Logitech (In most, but not all cases)

Networking Hardware: Cisco (Again, in *most* cases)

 

In other cases, there are a number (usually two) competitors both with equal quality products that differ by small amounts in the fight to be better then the other(s) such as:

 

Graphics: nVidia, ATI

CPUs: Intel, AMD

Hard Disks: Western Digital, Seagate (Now includes Maxtor & Quantum)

 

Where audio is concerned, if you want the best quality, buy Creative.

 

Best Sound Cards: Creative (X-Fi Range)

Best Speakers: Creative (e.g. Gigaworks s750)

Best MP3 Players: Creative (Zen)

 

 

As I said above, people will always argue differently because of a number of reasons such as:

 

1. Bad Support (nothing to do with product quality).
   
2. They had a (or several) broken one(s) (unfortunate, but it happens).
   
3. They suffered at the hands of one of the manufacturers poorest showings. However good the manufacturer, there will always be a couple of bad apples, but this doesn't detract from the quality of the manufacturer and all their products - problems happen, some staff are the bad apples and sometimes things just don't turn out how they were intended - it happens to them all.
   
4. They are unfairly biased towards a competitor because they either just like it or have other varying reasons to be biased.
   
5. They have bought into marketing hype that a mediocre but more widespread (and possible more supported/available) product is better (*cough*iPod*cough*).
   
6. They just like to argue.
   
7. Any combination of the above.
   
8. A. N. Other daft reason.

 

 

 

But the bottom line is, if you are bothered about buying the best quality product and money is not the most important factor - you go with the manufacturers above.

[alkatraz]

Oh, and I thought it would go without saying, but just in case, I'm gonna say it:

 

The above assumes you buy the right piece of kit. If you buy the wrong piece of kit, or more importantly if you buy kit that doesn't work great together, you are going to be disappointed. Compatibility is the watchword e.g. don't buy a stonking great speaker system and then plug it into a poor soundcard and then complain that the speakers are no good.

[Ghozer]

 

Where audio is concerned, if you want the best quality, buy Creative.

 

Best Sound Cards: Creative (X-Fi Range)

Best Speakers: Creative (e.g. Gigaworks s750)

Best MP3 Players: Creative (Zen)

 

i disagree, if you want the most popular brand at an 'ok' price, with bad driver support, buy Creative,

 

if you want good quality audio, (with EAX support) at professional level, buy Turtle Beach

[SpeedwayDan]

naming a list of manufacturers like that is pointless really.

 

yes some are know for consistently making good quality products, but there's loads out there doing a better job at certain things than others, the lists are endless now

[Guest]

Yep, and if you want good quality soundcards where you actually care about sound quality you won't generally find Creative anywhere on the list....check out http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ for info on decent stuff...and computer audio in general.

[Cayenne]

I've got a soundblaster Live! Thinking of changing it to something decent - it hums badly, doesn't matter which PCI slot I put it in. Do Yamaha still do sound cards? I am not interested in games, MIDI is essential though.