I Want a New Sound Card.
 

Ok, here is the lowdown. I built my computer roughly 18 months ago, and at the time I bought a shitty Maddog 4.1 sound card for it for 20 bucks. I feel it's the time to upgrade, but I'm relatively clueless about sound cards. The only reputable sound card company I know of is Creative, and appearantly, they make garbage nowadays? Basically, I need a recommendation for a good manufacturer, don't worry about telling me to get a card that supports x.1 channels. Thanks.

Creative makes garbage now? I was unaware of that. I bought a SB Audigy2 when it first came out and that is what I am still using. The thing has never let me down so I would recommend it highly.

I have an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 and it is hands down the best card I have heard in a long time. It does not have alot of the features of the creative card, but the poured all the extra stuff into the sound quality portion of the card vs. all the extra crap most people dont need or want. I think I got if for 79 bucks or so. Alot of places have them for 89 or 99.

I have SB Audigy ZS, which is pretty good. Also I have the Creative I-Trigue L3500 speakers, which works really well eventhough it's only 2.1 surround sound.

the audigy2 cards are very nice cards. I've also heard good things from M-audio....both have advantages and disadvantages from what I have heard.

I have to say that I've always been impressed by Creative sound cards, all the way from my original SB16 AWE32 ISA card right up to the Audigy2 I got a year ago. The biggest thing I have to say about Creative is that it's really the de-facto standard. All games, movie players, etc. should all have no trouble using all of its features, from EAX to Dolby Digital. Obviously if you're interested in doing studio quality mixing or need 32 MIDI channels or something, then a Creative card isn't for you. But for standard sound card stuff, you can't really go wrong with a Creative card, IMHO.

What Creative does well is gaming. Their cards support the widest variety of 3D positional sound systems, and they offload more of the calculations involved in such activities from your processor, improving overall performance in demanding games. They do fine in everything else too.

The biggest complaint I hear about Creative cards is that their drivers and utilities are relatively large and complex and resource-hungry, and it can be a chore to install a card and not end up with useless tray icons running for no reason other than to save you a few seconds when you want to change some setting somewhere.

If intense high-framerate gaming isn't a priority, the M-Audio cards are definitely worth looking into. By all accounts they do better in terms of sheer sound quality for music and movies than all but the most expensive Creative cards. And as someone already mentioned, they are more focused on quality than the quantity of features, so they might be a better value if you don't need the extra goodies.

I have no idea where M-Audio got this reputation for being a poor card for games. It baffles me. I have it and I cannot complain. I tried the Audigy 2 and I replaced it with the M-Audio within the week. I played games like C&C: Generals to HL2 and never been disappointed. I have played both Doom 3 and HL2 on a friends computer who had the Audigy 2 and I honestly couldn't not tell a difference but when we watched The Two Towers there was a world/universe of difference. My suggestion: M-Audio Revolution 7.1

Does the surround sound work properly using an M-Audio card? I'm genuinely curious...I always thought Creative had a lock on game surround sound with EAX.

The way the M-Audio does its surround sound is seperate outputs, not sure how the creative does it. If you are only outputting via a single stereo output to something that does the processing than the software has a thing called sensaura and it also has the SRS surround. I have mine hooked up to a 6.1 channel set up through seperate analog connections. It also has a dolby digital coax connector and not an optical connector, but adapters are easy to come by. I dont play to many games so really can not comment on the quality in gaming.