Soundblaster Live!, or on-board AC'97 sound?

Hi,

Which is better, an old Soundblaster Live! jobby (remember those), or on-board
AC'97 sound (in this case on an nForce-4 4X motherboard)?

Thanks

 

(boggles)

The vast majority of onboard sound devices are PCI devices, and consequently
indistinguishable from each other in that respect.

Whether a particular plug-in PCI card has it's own memory for samples, etc. is
another matter. Windows seems to want to load entire .WAV files into memory
before it starts to play them anyway, so any resources the card claims to have
may be left unused, except by specialised applications.

If you are after studio-quality sound, you are more likely to be interested in
plug-in cards, as they can (but do not necessarily) have more analogue
electronics. I have an old SoundBlaster-2 SCSI which is absolutely packed with
analogue components, and I still think it sounds better than many built-in sound
systems (when connected to the external amplifer and the rather large external
speaker stack..).

I would disagree in that:
a) No sound device sounds any good with terrible speakers. Get a decent
external amplifier, and speakers with a very good range (i.e. multiple cones of
appropriate sizes per cabinet). Then, for when you want to frag away into the
small hours, you can plug in your headphones, and let the neighbours sleep....
b) Proper DTS/Surround is really helped by having a large room (and many
speakers) to enjoy it in, and then it takes a lot of work setting it up and
getting it 'right'. Sadly, most people's hearing is not as acute as they like
to think it is, and many 'audiophiles' (or 'audiophools') waste a lot of money
on kit they do not need.
If you are just blasting the bug-eyed bad-guys, is it really worth it?

Swings and roundabouts. Try both, and see what suits your ears, and your
listening environment.

 

SBLive! Far better quality sound and lower CPU usage.

 

I`ve got a C-Media 8738 5.1 PCI Card in this PC which used to have a Duron
1.1ghz and Geforce 2 GTS (upgraded to Duron 1800 now) but I noticed in Grand
Prix 4 (and maybe others) the frame rate was significantly lower when using
the C-Media card for sound ie it dropped down to about 11fps however using
the onboard VIA AC97 (on ECS K7VZA) the frame rate was up at about 20fps
which doesn't sound much but its capped at that with this game and gets that
with an FX5200 in 2.4ghz system.

11fps ran like a dog... tried numerous tricks to speed it up becuase this
game seemed to have the same problems with the onboard sound on my laptop
and I had to set the sound acceleration to basic to get the 20fps otherwise
it too had the slow frame rate problem. So I don't know if it was just that
game but still intriuging.

 

Thanks all! SB Live! it is then!

 

Yeah I got one of those SB Live 5.1 OEM's off eBay for £ 5 off eBay and it
was *much* better then the C-Media 5.1 you should've heard the sound of
Metallica mp3 through my Inspire speakers the cheap ones w/o digital
connection that is and SBLive I had didn't have digital connection anyway
although this C-Media has an SPDIF connection. I would use an SBLive over
onboard everytime.

 

Use both. Have WMP and Winamp, etc. configured to output to the
Soundblaster and have the onboard sound set as the default sound device.
That way you can have your films and music playing loud through your hi-fi
or whatever and system sounds coming through your desktop speakers.

ss.

 

So what would be the point of having the capability of 64 simultaneous
hardware mixed voices coming from the SB Live, if I'm only using 1 of them?