Sound Cards

On a sunny day (Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:46:24 -0700) it happened Jim Thompson wrote in :

If you can still get these, the old Creative labs Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI. Ensoniq was bought by Creative, their cards were very good. Was marketed as soundblaster xxx bit PCI IIRC. Forget about SB live and stuff, more expensive and much worse quality. Many of the other cheap cards use cheap chips, are noisy, and do not allow faders to go to zero, a nuisance if you still have a source connected.

Thanks to all who offered ideas!

I went with Jan's... "old" Creative Labs... cheap but rated well.

...Jim Thompson

Agreed. These cards are often eBay-able very cheaply, since are not the "latest and greatest". Your local computer-surplus store may very well have one or more sitting around on the shelves.

Cards with the original ES1370 chip seem (in my limited experience) to have the best reputation. Cards with the newer ES1371 (and ES1373 I think) cards may not have quite as good a codec onboard, but are still very good.

I bought "Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE"

...Jim Thompson

Uhhh... "very good" s*it, at best. If one could rate degrees of s*it, then sure... A turd is a turd. Yeah they work but are hardly the right choice when out of production Creative SB and Audigy cards can be had for the same dollars.

On a sunny day (Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:39:37 -0700) it happened Jim Thompson wrote in :

Thats is most certainly not an SB xxx bit PCI based on Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI :-) Problem with some of those new cards, and especially the SB Live, is that they resample everything, all those conversions degrade quality. For the Live you can hear it clearly compared to a 5880. I have not tested the audigy, hopefully it is better.