E-MU are the professional sector of Creative, the cards are some of the best on the market, analogue circuitry wise. So good in fact that I will be buying one soon.

http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1

Quote from: Deaths Headhttp://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1

Is that drivers or just software?

Shouldnt matter actually, it appears to have an ASIO interface, which is even better

Quote from: Deaths Headhttp://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1

Thats the puppy.  Theyre dead good, you can sort of create hardware links in the software, to send your input signals through different DSP blocks and out different outputs on the back of yer comp

Thats where ASIO comes in, funky C :

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213488,00.html

If you want to bypass the ugly 48khz resampling of the Windows environment ASIO is the way to go: http://www.asio4all.com/

Quote from: EagleWhy does my Audigy 4 sound like s***?
 

Becaude it takes after the German soccer team? :mutley:

I wish I got an E-mu instead of this audigy piece of poo.

Hmmsk, reccomending all these audiophile-pleasing cards is great, but last time I looked into them I couldnt find anything that would do proper 5.1 out of the box that could touch an audigy 2.  Is this still the case (albeit replacing audigy with Xfi)?  Do any of these fancy m-audio or emu cards do proper 5.1 yet?

Not really as they are semi-pro and therefore designed for high quality analogue audio and MIDI, although I can still name you some cards that will do the 5.1 job as well MUCH better than an audigy 2.

X-Fi Platimum/Elite (or the XtremeMusic - Plat has amped headphone out and elite has better DACs)
M-Audio Revolution 5.1/7.1 (5.1 has pretty good analogue+integrated headphone ampage, 7.1 is missing that)

Out of the semi pro cards that dont offer 5.1 the three names always talked about are the ESI Juli@, E-MU 1212M and the E-MU 0404. Im getting a 1212M*, if I want 5.1 Ill use the DVD/SACD player.

Depends really though. Are you after hardware AC3 decoding or a simple digital passthrough? Theres some blinding cards with optical/coax out at half the cost of an X-Fi Platinum or Elite.


* Pretty much a certainty, now that Greg has crafted me the twin 1/4" mono jack to stereo 3.5mm interconnect I need.

any htpc must have a HDA soundcard tbpfh

 :shock:  :shock:  :shock:
 :whoops:  :whoops:  :whoops:

Looks like I had two equalizers on the go at once: Creatives one and the one in Winamp... no wonder things were sounding bad!  :whoops:

Still not perfect but its handling teh high-end much better now...

...ahem.  Scuttles off to bed...

Turn off all the SRS trueSorround CMS3D virtual positronic wow! crap and other DSPs and it will sound better too.

seeing as all graphic equalizers are just filters which dirty the sound and ruins the production of every record.