Death to Soundblaster Live

[RabidYak]

Is it just me, or did creative deliberatly design the Soundblaster Live to be incompatable and bug-ridden to force people to buy newer and better cards?

I dodnt really pay much attension to Soundcards, so I put a OEM Live! 5.1 in my 2200+ machine when I building thinking that it was a half decent card and wasent bad for the money. Ive not had difficulty with some games, but i've had to totally turn off the hardware acceleration to stop the piece of shit from fuzzing and skipping directsound related output on allot of stuff. Now i'm playing Star Trek - Armada (aqquired in the same budget pack as the maligned Elite Force) and the sound is just totally falling apart even without acceleration. Now its bad enough that i've got a acceleration-capable soundcard that I cant use to its full extent, but not being able to use it without the acceleration is just plain taking the piss.

So, i'm going to rip the bastard out and put it in my Net/Office machine to replace the Aureal Vortex card in there (which also has always been a pain in the arse, BSODs and random freezing galore) and replace it with an cheap OEM Audigy card. If that doesent work properly i'm going to put them both in a burning bag of crap on Creative's doorstep and throw my dead Fujitsu HD througth thier window to get thier attension. Bastards.

[were]

is soundblaster live even compatible with XP? I know that the computer i got home is a piece of shit, because of the soundcard i have, i couldnt even play the games i love like quake.

AND, there is no point shutting the sound off..what's the use?

as for the soundcard, its ONBOARD..piece of shit..

[RabidYak]

Just disable your onboard in the bios and put a proper PCI card in. All the recent machines in my house have onboard sound, but none of them actually use it.

The Live! works fine in XP and causes no problems with any other type of application, its just some stuff that uses directsound that causes it to throw a wobbler. Since pratically every windows game uses DirectX thesedays, its pratically pot luck when you buy one whether your going to get decent sound out of the thing or not. Damn thing pisses off recent versions of PinMAME off as well, I have to use an older version and turn the volume down a bit in the test menus on some games to get solid and consistant sound.

[Silverhaze]

Ive had a sblive for years, taken from my old P200 and slapped into my 600 on which I had to disable the onboard sound.

I've never used the hardware accelleration thing as its never really worked right. It uses its onboard effects to create echos in tunnels in games and stuff like that still though.

I didnt experience any problems with sound in XP apart from with my music software but thats a different problem.

I want a SB Audigy with the front panel thing

[Damian]

Still using Sound Blaster 16 here.

[KoHC]

That's a pretty old issue between Creative and VIA. For some reason they don't work too well together. The newer VIA 4-in-1 driver should solve some (maybe all) of the problems.

I have SB Live 5.1 myself. Besides occasional poping sounds, everything works fine.

I would suggest not get Audigy as they're not as good as what Creative claims to be. Pick up a cheaper Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or fancy Hercules Game Theater.

Although I love my Vortex2 card I would say it's time to take those card out of your computer. No software support for it is really pain in the ass to deal with. Especially since M$ didn't do a good job on the XP driver the card is almost useless in XP.

[Silverhaze]

Gaming isnt a priority for my sound card. Music software ease of use and compatibility sells for me.

[RabidYak]

Im particularly worried about mega performance, I just want a card that fucking works properly. The original Audigy is only £50 on OEM now and i'd prefer a Creative card to go with the matching set of Inspire speakers I got recently, but i'm looking at the Hercules Fortismo as its about the same price and supports 7.1 as opposed to Audigy's 5.1.

Turtle Beach cards are non-existant in this country outside of the occasional Dell prebuild line and i'm not too keen on the Game Theatre since its mostly external and I dont want to pay for loads of stuff i'm never going to use.

[KoHC]

In Europe VideoLogic carries exact the same line of products as TurtleBeach. I believe VideoLogic's SonicFury is the exact same card as Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.

[Silverhaze]

Video who?

[KoHC]

http://www.videologic.com