[Nuke]

well really i dont have a sound card, i have a usb extigy, which came out around the same time as the first audigy cards, but i want to get a card thats better that what i have now. i was looking at the x-fi xtreme music card, about $130. now im no audiophile so thats about as expensive as im willing to go. the only thing i dont like about the newer creative labs cards is the absence of a gameport. i know gameports are beeing phased out but id like to build my own analog controlers. anyway can anyone reccomend any other cards in the $80-$130 price range? its gotta be better than what ime running and id perfer it to have a game port.

[pecenipicek]

i'm looking for something in the same price range, any reccomendations? i'm particularily biased towards the SB Live! series

[Nuke]

id like to get away from creative labs myself. but it seems they have a dammned monopoly on sound cards theese days. the problem i have with creative soundcards is their software is a whore. it likes to load up a bunch of crap at startup, and if you forbid it, then half the features dont work. if you want to use the remote, you have to use their crappy audio player, and so on. just so many annoyances. still their hardware is good and that makes the software tolerable.

[castor]

Yeah, creative is the MS of soundcards - as long as gaming is important, there are no real choices

[Fury]

Ironically Creative Labs is the main developer of their own demise; OpenAL. Each passing day EAX becomes less and less important. And there are good alternatives if you are willing to sacrifice on EAX support.
- HDA X Plosion 7.1
- X-Mystique 7.1

[Cyker]

Yeah, it just pisses me off that Gravis and Aureal got killed off by Creative - Those two had some really good ideas and helped push the market along; Gravis with the first consumer wavetable sample card (Beloved by demosceners everywhere) that allowed programmers to off-load work from the CPU to the soundcard (The first real SPU? ) and Aureal with their awesome 3D environmental effects, which STILL doesn't have a current equivalent (EAX, even the latest ones, just doesn't come close to A3D2; It's just static reverb, go nothing to do with the game-world at all!)

The problem is the current cards are just so behind CL - The Philips Edge range were not bad cards, but they stagnated, and the current card is crapper than my Live! yet only supports WinXP!!

I'm stuffed because the last decent card I can buy is an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum; It's one of the only cards that has '98 and 2000 drivers...

If someone would just make a killer card that worked in Linux, '98, 2k and had a gameport I'd jump in a second

Well, unless it was like, £999 or something.

[Flipside]

Agreed Cyker, Aureal A3D was awesome! I remember playing Unreal with it on and the effect was unbelievable, far far better than anything I've heard from an EAX system.

[butter_pat_head]

Ironically Creative Labs is the main developer of their own demise; OpenAL. Each passing day EAX becomes less and less important. And there are good alternatives if you are willing to sacrifice on EAX support.
- HDA X Plosion 7.1
- X-Mystique 7.1

</lurk>

I own a X-Plosion and it rocks!  My AV reciver sings nicely with this card.  Gaming in surround has never sounded so good.  Dolby Digital and DTS encoding FTW!  As for EAX, never had it before with my SB Live! (never seemed to work or make any difference to the sound) so I havn't lost anything.  But than again the HDAs have A3D support so those older games will benifit with this card.

The only problems with the X-plosion is the lack of Hardware wavetable sound, keeps resetting to desktop speakers in the multimedia properties and has a problem with keeping the digital audio stream alive.  However the last two problems I have easly fixed with the help of a small app I wrote.  Anybody who onw this card and are affected by those two problems speak up and Il upload it somewhere to download.

<lurk>

[Nuke]

Ironically Creative Labs is the main developer of their own demise; OpenAL. Each passing day EAX becomes less and less important. And there are good alternatives if you are willing to sacrifice on EAX support.
- HDA X Plosion 7.1
- X-Mystique 7.1

any chance you can link to the offitial site, all google seems to know how to do is give me a list of people who are selling them.

*edit

nevermind i found em. ON PAGE 4.

i like the card, especially the shielded old skool capacitors (which tend to make equipment sound better). i take it all those ports are single channel jacks. i dont have a reciever system, i got theese old 6.1 channel creative labs speekers with their damn proprietary multichannel jack connector on it, with a proprietary cable. il probibly need an adaptor cable for the thing. il probibly get a better speaker setup later on down the line. theese are certainly showing their age. i have a feeling im gonna end up getting stuck with a creative labs product though. im still trying to find some tech specs for this one though. so unless anyone could recomend anything else its between the xfi xtreem music and the HDA X Plosion 7.1. really im probibly just gonna go with creative labs, just to get something that works with my speakers.

[Flipside]

I like my Audiophile, but that's really a specialist musicians' card, more designed around ASIO supprt, but damn good at its job