Alls I know is they both didn't work with my MSI K7 Master-S. Running Win2k then I upp'd to Win XP, then down the Win 98. WOrked .... almost... under Win98 but something would snap and cause the thing to generate about 5000000000000000000db of "snap crackle pop" all of a sudden.
In all I spent abooOOT 7 hours total on the phone with SB Tech and 3 solid weaks on every irc tech chan and tech forum known to man. And done/followed every official/unofficial fix know to man. Tweaked drivers, vd files, registry, bios. I actually went throught all this crap more because it was a challenge, has after about 2 weeks with the SB Gamer X 5.1 which was returned for another... I order a TB Santa Cruz. I then actually got the change to try the Audigy and pretty much the same thing..
I even had 2 MSI K7 Masters available to me. Same situation with both.
By the end of it all I threw in the TB SC and it works great, moved back from Win98 to Win2k still works. I'll come to the conclusion the the "via sb" bug bites...
Boo for Via and and SB. For not tackling whatever issues exist between them and making life easier for the users.. Since both companies pretty much have strong holds over the market.
The Audigy is sexy though... i must admit. The layout and gold connectors and such n such and supposed features and such and such... shame i couldn't get it working..
During my troubles I came across alot of people with via chipsets (686b) working fine.. but hey... i'm a loser