Last year, after reading comments here and on the net, I bought an M-Audio Audiophile 24/96. While it produces noticeably better sound than a SB Live, especially using soft synths, with minimal latency and 24 bits/96 KHz quality, I consider it a "professional" card. It lacks things that can be useful in everyday life, like a headphone jack, or a mic input, so I can connect a $10 headphone/microphone gizmo and try to talk to you on Skype for example.

Also, it has a severe drawback (for me), and please don't laugh: It doesn't provide hadware 3D acceleration, so you can't play games with it.

I am not a musician per se, so my one PC must be used for everything I do, including surfing the internet, playing games and so on. Before you ask, yes, I want to continue playing games, as time permits. I like them and I like tinkering with the keyboard also and I have to find a solution.

I can't afford a second PC as a "music only" PC as Frank Rosenthal and some others of you do, so the card that could replace the audiophile, must have hardware 3D acceleration.

I am an amateur, playing at home and the budget is very limited. Can I use a later generation Soundblaster card like the SB Audigy 2 or 4 or even better the X-Fi that supposedly (creative says so) provide ASIO 2.0 compatibility and fulfill my dreams?

Anyone has experience with this?

P.S. I haven't (REALLY HARD) tried to tidy things up in the PC, like trying hard to see if a borrowed SB Live and the Audiophile can coexist in peace and serve my purposes. If they do, I probably don't really need a new soundcard, but then I would probably have to look for a mixer to sum up all those outputs.

Wishing a Happy New Year to everyone here,
Theodore

Why don't you use two soundcards in your pc? if you have a built in soundcard on your motherboard, chances are it's good enough to play games, and all other everyday pc things, if your pc case has a headphone jack in the front, hook that up to your motherboard if it isn't allready and you have a headphone jack. As long as the Audiophile card has it's own IRQ (Real IRQs not the windows "fake" ones) there will not be any conflict among the two soundcards. I use a Terratec Phase 22 card in my audio PC, but I also have the onboard AC97 card enabled, that way I can play games, listen to mp3s, and not have the windows sounds interfere with my recording.

Doc-Z

Theodore, you can safely use two soundcards (SB-Live & M-Audio. That's what I do on my music computer (Audidy Platium 2 for midi in & out and Steinberg VSL2020 midi in and audio). It depends how important quality is to you, I find the Audigy cards fairly good as an all purpose soundcard. If you already have all the cards why not just use them?

Hi Doc and Frank,
as I stated, I haven't really tried hard to make them work together. Doing so, I have to do a complete "clean up" of the PC, backing things up etc and I just didn't bother until now that I miss my softsynth toys.

I guess I'll have to do it sometime, the question remains if the new Soundblaster can do it in one card. You know, you have to take the Live's output and feed it to the Audiophile line in, etc etc, but then you lose future expansion like buying 5.1 surround sound blah blah
Thanks, Theodore

why would you need to clean out your system? just stick the thing in there and it'll probably work..

My point is if you already paid the dough to get a quality m-audio card, you shouldn't need to pay out twice that for a lesser card to get less functionality that you can achieve by using your existing sb card alongside the m-audio.
just my 2cents

Doc-z

Hi There
Doc-z is correct, providing your operating system is later then Win 98, (which can sometimes cause problems) the only thing I would say is, (And this applies whenever you install any Hardware or Software) Create a System Restore Point so that you can always go back.
Another point is that if the second soundcard is for a specific task, then just keep it for that particular job, and feed the output from it, to an input on the M-Audio Card thus minimising set up.

Bill

Hi there all, thanks for your replies.

I have XP, and I have a fairly good knowledge of PC's. Used to work for 6 years in a computer store as a salesperson/technician. Two of my former colleagues there continue this line of work at their shop and i can drop by or call anytime I have a question that I need answered. Sometimes they do the same thing also, especially when it has to do with older hardware.

The reason to clean up is that i download and install every thing I see on the internet on that pc, meaning it is full of things that I may not need now but I installed 2-3 years ago (and we all know that usually things leave tracs and mess up registry if you uninstall them). I treat it a garbage can of programs. The only reason the system is up and running today is that I am careful enough to read readme files and such.

Usually I work that way, eg "stick it in and it will work", it didn't work like that with the Audiophile and the Live. Audiophile's FAQs say that they don't endorse mixing up with another soundcard. Also, I didn't mention that my motherboard has an embedded el cheapo AC97 soundcard, which won't work along with the Audiophile or the Live.

True, I probably can manage to put them in and make them work together, but in a system like that, you won;t exactly be sure if it is a driver that causes a problem, or a forgotten program somewhere, hence the clean install. And...the older I get, the less i want to mess with things. Sad but true.

Anyway, has anyone worked with an Audigy 4 or the new X-Fi?

I work at a distributor of computer peripherials, we handle the X-fi and audigy cards, and I can't say that I've been blown away by any of them. The X-fi has a lot of converters, and is nice for surround/gaming/multimedia but for anything resembling professional audio work, you need something better. It will work, but with horrible latency, a lot of dropped samples, horrible drivers a lot of crashes, and for all that you pay twice what a entry leve pro card costs. I run AC97 along side my Terratec Producer Phase 22, it works perfectly, the only thing I had to work out was that the Phase needed it's own real IRQ, so I had to mess a bit with finding the correct PCI slot for it, since some of the PCI slots share IRQs. Then I had to switch the IRQ of the AC97 in the BIOS, it works great. Even WDM works in Sonar using both cards at the same time, and it's quite practical, ASIO is shit in Sonar, but rock solid in FL Studio.
Bottom line, creative makes great soundcards for regular multimedia, like playing games, movies, and your basic desktop needs, but for pro sound... well.. it's up to you, but I wouldn't. But that is entirely my own opinion.


Doc-Z

and


"Sir, I laugh at you". It never crossed your mind that you may be doing something terribly wrong? My Audigy 4 Pro performs on 24/96 with close to no latencty at all, not a single drop-out, no crashes, delivering professional pre-master-ready recordings.

But then again, you told Trident earlier not to clean out his system and "just stick the thing in there and it'll probably work.." so I shouldn't be surprised. But still...

I've owned everything form SB 16 ASP to SB Audigy 2 platinum. I've had a go at Audigy 4 and the new X-fi here at work, and I can't say that I'm at all pleased with the performance. I've never felt that the Creative WDM drivers were stable enough for DAW work, and I've never thought much of the sound recorded on them either. Too much noise, system crashes, it all depends on your system and what software you use offcourse, if you got a system that works for you great! but I'm not gonna pay out 200$ for a soundcard that is outperformed by a 80$ one... and as I said, that is just my experience and my opinion. You are free to disagree with me.
I used to pull my hair out working with my audigy 2, I got an average latency of 35ms at 48khz using WDM drivers, a -50db noise floor, the SPDIF was not digital, it got a D/A - A/D conversion before beeing stored in the system, I could go on and on, but as soon as I bought my Terratec, all problems went away... 5ms latency @ 48khz, about -90db noise floor, real SPDIF digital, 1/4" balanced inputs... and it costs 70$ I payed 215$ for my Audigy2 Platinum....

Doc-Z

Doc,
I have also heard that Sonar is not exactly the most cooperative program when it comes to sound drivers but I don't use it. I think the WDM drivers are the culprit, use ASIO instead.

My AC97 card doesn't seem to like other sound cards being around so it is deactivated in the BIOS.

I had managed to get the latency down to about 10-12ms in the SB Live for 48KHz/16 bits, using ASIO4ALL and then to about 8ms with the hacked KX drivers, if I remember well they are drivers made for Creative's own E-Mu line of cards that share the same processor as the Live and Audigy. Then I bought the Audiophile and the latency went down to maybe 5-6ms in 96KHz/24bits.

Also, the quality of the sound itself also changed, even not so good MP3's were playing with better clarity, they were sounding on the Audiophile like I got some new speakers. I could actually hear the difference.

Burkels,
please tell me more about your setup.

Well to start with: I recently bought a new system that I use for my music ONLY. It doesn't even have internet access :-) So it's a very clean P4/3 GHz system, running WinXP-Pro (every unwanted and not needed accessory removed), 1 Gb RAM, 250 GB HD, Audigy 4 Pro for sound, MIDI through a Steinberg Midex-3 and through USB, Club Dual videocard powering two 17" TFT's. For software I use Adobe Audition and Cubase SX. And that's pretty much all there is on the system.

Latency is not only caused by your soundcard or its driver. Other drivers, memory-eating DLL's that you don't need at all at that moment, drivers for games, joysticks, gamepads, video-accelerators, etc etc, they all want their part of the CPU's 'attention'. Which, of course, causes your system to slow down and cause unacceptable latency when you're recording.

So even though I know not everyone can "just" go out and buy a music-only PC, I still recommend that as the best solution when you're interested in making multi-track recordings on your PC.