Quote Originally Posted by ampassasinbirmingham
Quote Originally Posted by Martin Dust
Soundblasters are fine for games and that's about it Bassy. We use two of these:

http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/d2/pag...f5783d9c9b8f89

Martin
with you all the way martain!!
juz a tip: you can you use the kx driver for yer sb live 5.1 (among others) if you've got one. this will swap the outputs and the sound improves a lot (of course still far from being state-of-the-art, don't get me wrong)...

"The kX Audio Driver is an independent WDM (Windows Driver Model) driver for all EMU10K1 and EMU10K2-based soundcards manufactured by Creative Technology Ltd. and/or E-mu Systems Inc., including the SoundBlaster Live! series, the E-mu Audio Production Studio (APS) card, and the Audigy / Audigy2 series of cards."

This kinda explains the situation:

"The AC97 Codecs used in SBLive! cards are rather noisy devices (when compared to I2S Codecs), and this leads to some quality problems. As a rule, SBLive Rear outputs have much better Signal To Noise Ratio (SNR), Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) and Channel Separation (acs) since they use the I2S Codec. So, if you want to get better sound quality for music playback it is recommended that you plug your speakers into the 'Rear Out' (the black output :!: ) and enable the 'Swap Front and Rear' kX Mixer option (the swap is enabled by default)."


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