Value Sound Card?

[rocketbubba]

Even though everyone has pretty much covered all the bases of the subject in this thread, I'd like to offer my 2 cents worth of experience. I have a mobo with VIA chipset and I've been searching for a decent inexpensive sound card that will work correctly with my system. I have tried the onboard C-Media, Hercules Fortissimo II, and Turtle Beach Montego II (Vortex 2) sound cards. I liked the onboard sound, but it had some problems (trouble with mic, line-in, and joystick support). I liked the Herc, but for it stopped working for some reason and even when it was working it didn't sound any better than the C-Media. I liked the TBM2, but after installing it little funky things started happening and stopped when I uninstalled it (probably because of VIA - Vortex conflicts). I've stayed away from anything Creative makes because of possible conflicts there. I'm sure the Santa Cruz is great, but it's more than I want to spend. So, finally, I've settled on a Philips Seismic Edge 5.1 card. I read that the folks at Philips worked hard to make it compatible with a variety of chipsets (including VIA). In addition, Philips is a large company that appears like they're in it for the long haul. You never know what will happen, but I think I'll have support for this card for a long time to come. Best of all - it was cheap!! Just my 2-cents.

 

[Goi]

You cannot get 5.1 individual, discrete channels from stereo, that's a fact you can't change. What you can do to get the center, rear and sub channels is do some sort of processing to the front L/R soundstage to obtain these other channels. Mirroring the fronts to the rears, mixing them for the center and doing a low pass filter to get the LFE channel is a simple and somewhat effective way of doing it, but there are better 5.1 modes, such as DPL2, DTS ES:Neo, TMS5 and Circle Surround modes. I don't know of any consumer card that supports these modes in hardware though...

As for sound quality, its subjective, and I haven't seen any measurements of the Philips AcousticEdge cards, but I've seen measurements of the TBSC, and they're pretty impressive among consumer cards, beating out the MX300 and SB Live! pretty handily. Also, the TBSC has 20bit DACs and 18bit ADCs by Crystal Semiconductors, while AFAIK the Philips have 16bit DAC/ADCs by Philips...by reputation Crystal is arguably better than Philips, and are used in many high end audio/video equipment, but of course without a side by side qualitative and quantitative comparison not much can be said.

 

[JHeiderman]

Originally posted by: Goi You can get 5.1 individual, discrete channels from stereo, that's a fact you can't change.

Don't you mean you CAN NOT get 5.1 individual, discrete channels from stereo?

- J

 

[sawhizzo]

Damn me, if I'd've waited for all of these replys to get in, I'd've gotten a migraine.

I went with the Philips...I think it was Acoustic Edge Digital, $50, from Circuit City (Yes, I know I could've done better online, but I was in a hurry.)

Anyway, it sounds great (and, for whoever was talking about decent speakers, I've got cambridge soundworks. Its a baseline model, but it ought to do fairly well, right?). A few questions though.

1) While playing Day of Defeat (a half life mod) I enabled EAX to try and get that advantage, but there was about a 1 to 1.5 second delay from time of action to the time the sound came out. Disabling EAX in the game (although not on the card) fixed this. However, I could tell the difference in directional sound while I had EAX enabled...anyway to get this to work w/o the delay?

2) While listening to mp3s, I noticed it ran a lot more smoothly than before while mutlitasking, but still not as well as I'd like. I"m currently using winamp 2.8 ( I think, I'm at work), with a rather large playlist. Is there any way for this philips card to use a different/better codec, or get better mp3 playback with winamp? (Or anything else, although I'm pretty partial to winamp).

Also, this thing came with a bunch of leads that I don't know what they do. Anyone feel like talking me through all the options of a new sound card, and telling me how I might take advantage of them?

 

[sawhizzo]

Originally posted by: sawhizzo
Damn me, if I'd've waited for all of these replys to get in, I'd've gotten a migraine.

this was originally intended to read, "Damn me, if I'd've waited for all thse replys to get in , I'd've gotten a migraine. "

 

[RanDum72]

As for sound quality, its subjective,

I agree.

 

[sawhizzo]

 

[sawhizzo]

oops. bump.

 

[Goi]

Don't you mean you CAN NOT get 5.1 individual, discrete channels from stereo?

Oops, you're absolutely right...

 

[sawhizzo]

One more bump, than I'll leave well enough alone.

 

[Mem]

Anyway, it sounds great (and, for whoever was talking about decent speakers, I've got cambridge soundworks. Its a baseline model, but it ought to do fairly well, right?).

Yes they will do as a base standard,you can always upgrade speakers down the road if you want to improve the sound quality even more,btw you can check you`ve the latest drivers for your AE from here .

 

[sawhizzo]

Got 'em. Actually grabbed them before I installed the card.