On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 14:34 -0500, Phil Sexton wrote: > On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 14:00, kurtz wrote concerning sblive: > > > Well, audio quality will be far from being the same, anyway it's a > > very useful setup. > > > > Indeed old AWE32's analog audio quality is known to be better than > > that of newer Creative cards, including Live! > > Any experience with the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz cards? I believe they > have better sound compared to the SBLive cards (on my Windows machine as > games seem not to like the Turtle Beach), at least with these 65 year > old ears with tinnitus starting to rear it's ugly head... The SBLive/Audigy is a great gaming card thanks to the hardware mixing. I suspect the Turtle Beach doesn't do that. But, when I used to trade a lot of Dead bootlegs, the Turtle Beach (along with the Zefiro ZA2) were very highly regarded, especially for DAT -> HD transfers. Anything with an SBLive generation was untradable: because of a hardware resampling bug, they couldn't make a perfect copy of a DAT via the SPDIF port. That problem was fixed with the Audigy (and probably later Lives). When it comes to S/N the Audigy is way better than the Live. I think the Live got a lot of bad press for this and they made sure to improve it. My earlier post had the numbers wrong, the analog Line2/Mic2 in on my Audigy 2 ZS gets about 112 dB. It actually says on the box 108 dB, but a "112 dB S/N" sticker comes with it, and a note saying they improved to 112 dB after printing the boxes. Cheesy marketing ploy, but measurement (using the "Peak" patch with the kX driver ;-) shows it to be accurate. One more point to remember, the Audigy 2 is the same as the Audigy, except it supports up to 24 bit, 96 and 192 kHz streams. Actually one stereo stream to be exact. And this is not yet supported in the Linux driver, but should be supported very soon. I think the Audigy 2 Value goes for like $60, this would make it an excellent low end 24/96 card. Lee
