Sound cards: Audigy vs. Santa Cruz

[Tremo]

Guys,

Which is better? I hear many repors about certain Soundblaster cards having problems with certain mobos with RAID controller, like the Abit KG7R, giving crackling sound. Same reports say the Turtle Beach card works like a champ. What's the experiences on this board? Has Creative fixed the problem with the Audigy boards? Or is the SC still the way to go? Thanks.

[slingshot]

Well I'm a user of the Santa Cruz soundcard and am very pleased with it!
I believe that Creative had much better products a few years ago but the competition is bypassing them!
Now I'm gonna get slammed! Duck..:D

ss

[InnovaZero]

Spec wise, the Soundblaster tramples nearly anything on the market, the only problem is that it has conflicting problems with other hardware.

[Tremo]

I just also found out that the SB Audigy cards have some sort of built-in hardware "copyright cop" copy control function (digital rights management). To hell with that, I require the freeedom to exercise my fair-use rights. That makes the choice pretty simple, I'd say.

[mirkwood]

this is from the read me that is part of the audigy Ex install, I've had mine for a bit over a week now.. had to reformat right off the bat, the drivers are kinda sketchy at best. Most of the software dvd players won't work with it, (really sucks as that's what I bought it for) even fruityloops retail quit working.. turns out most if not all of the software bundled with has been tweaked to work with it,,sort of, kind of like everything is a one off issue, and the best is yet to come.. creative appears to not be in any rush to fix the drivers for it.. and it has issues with a few ati vid cards too. Go check out the forums at creative.com and you will find some very unhappy people in the audigy section.


DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT(DRM) TECHNOLOGY
-----------------------------------------
Micosoft's Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology is a
method of securing the audio content.
This support is only available in Windows Millennium Edition.
For security against unauthorised duplication, the Sound
Blaster
Audigy will shut down its digital output (including the SPDIF
Output from the Audigy Drive) during playback of the encrypted
files through a Microsoft DRM supported audio player (e.g.
Creative PlayCenter).

[BC]

I agree with slingshot. creative was king **** a few years ago now not so.

I have a Game Theater XP and It ROCKS! It is 6.1 does not have any squelch like the SB Aud does. And has been rock solid for like 6 months. And you can find these bad boys pretty cheap for like $130 @ BB's and the like cheaper online. It has a break out box to hook all your speakers into. You can set it on your desk and have extra USB slots right there. I have hooked it up to my stereo through the optical outputs and played some serious games on my 42" ultravision. This card WAS the 5.1 but with the latest drivers from Gullimont they decied to make it 6.1 now. How nice of them.
Sorry didn't stay with the 2 you were talking about but thought you might be interested.
It uses the CS4630 sound processor FYI

[bunkskunk]

I have the audigy platinum and it's great. Sounds fantastic and comes with a whole cd bay thing full of inputs and outputs. Don't know what most of them do, but it's kewl anyway. I haven't loaded alot of the software yet, but it's causing no problems, the drivers seem stable, and it sounds really nice. I have an athlonxp, windows xp pro, a geforce3 ti200, and a soyo kt266a chipset mobo. If it works with that volitile combination of parts it can't be that bad.

:D

[BC]

I have just heard that the Audi has some squeching in it. But I am glad I bought my XP b4 Audigies...well maybe not. Because this XP has the same and more inputs and outputs that the plat does for almost half the cost.

$90 v $160 almost half.

[bunkskunk]

Hehe bc's probably right,

Unless you get lucky like me and find a mislabeled audigy plat at fry's for 49.99 and they don't notice when you buy it!

:) :eek: :D :cool:

[NIGHTMIST]

why not the PHILLIPS ACOUSTIC EDGE (PHL PSC706)
around 80 dollars and i read a lot of great reviews on it
i am surprised nobody else has mentioned it!!

[Antix]

We tend to approach what has the best sales and with what we trust, maybe no-one here has heard of that soundcard.