[gIzzE]

Originally Posted by Shadow

I would advise against buying anything by Creative if you're after a pro-audio setup for recording / monitoring / music production. Get an M-Audio 2496 or Audiophile 192. Solid, no frills, no "MegaPHATBassExtensionzzzz", no crappy spatializer effects - just the bits, as accurately as possible and with low-latency ASIO drivers (I can run my system down to ~ 2ms latency each way). Headphone amps built into sound cards are pretty crappy compromises, so the M-Audios don't have one. Get a quality external headphone amp (I've got a Lake People G99, from Thomann.de, and I love it) and drive it from the balanced outs from the sound card.

I agree, I use http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/FireWireSolo.html

Superb and allows me to transfer it between computers, use it on my Macbook Pro for DJing, iMac for driving a Rotel amp and Dunlavy speakers and it is now 4 years old.

There is also a USB one I think.

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by SiKkBaSs

Sweeping generalisation I've heard is there are audiophiles who aren't really audiophiles, those that are audiophiles and those that are really the "audiophiles, audiophile"



I use REASON and will be looking forward to the difference. Will need to buy some better headphones in the future too.

A lot of what you read from the audiophile world is crap (actually, 90% of everything is crap but that's a different story). As an electronics engineer by education (and a software engineer by choice) with some background in broadcast audio and a passion for guitars, why yes I do have strong opinions in this area

Computers are a nasty electrical environment for low-level analogue audio signals, and consumer digital audio brings a world of different problems (clock jitter etc.), plus at the end of the day you still need to convert to analogue to hear it. Even then, the best electrical design in the world can be rendered useless by crappy driver support (and most drivers are buggy, simply because testing drivers on every combination is impossible).

On better headphones - a while back I bought a £250 pair of ear-canal headphones, (Shure E5Cs before they became something else) and so far they have effortlessly revealed the defects in every other piece of kit I own. They are stunning in clarity - you really do hear things in the music that you didn't notice before. Unfortunately that includes noise, aliasing, MPEG artefacts, hiss from the headphone amp driver stage... You may just find it starts another cycle of upgrades

[NFS]

Originally Posted by Shadow

I'm glad it works for you - my experiences have been pretty poor, from the early Audigy drivers not being multi-core safe (and blue-screening the OS), the later Audigy 2 drivers blue-screening because they were incompatible with Executive Diskeeper, the Audigy 2 force-resampling everything internally to 48 kHz whether you liked it or not, the lack of pass-thru S/PDIF, the MIDI I/O botched onto a joystick port, the shitty ASIO support for Cubase... I gave up on Creative products shortly after. Maybe they've fixed all these things now, I don't know - life was too short to wait for them to fix all their bugs.

IMO, a soundcard should not colour the sound; that means no digital effects, no EQ, no reclocking, no spatialisers - all these things might make your music sound better, but that's not what you want if you're making music, because you'd normally want to produce something that "translates" to whatever system the listener is playing it on.

Same argument for studio monitor speakers - they'll sound like shit next to some bass-heavy HiFi with built in "smile" EQ, or some £10,000 "audiophile" valve amp that's actually running at 10%+ THD above 1kHz and creating frequencies that just aren't there in the original material.

To be fair, you seem to have a totally different requirement to me. You are talking about a professional studio quality setup. I just want something that works well for games, makes the most of my mp3 collection and let's me jam along with backing tracks on my guitar.

My sound card cost £ 50, it supports asio drivers and samples at 96khz, so I can hear myself playing in real time. It clearly won't be as good as something costing 5 times the price. I play my guitar through a pod XT and it sounds easily good enough for my purposes.

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by NFS

TMy sound card cost £ 50, it supports asio drivers and samples at 96khz, so I can hear myself playing in real time. It clearly won't be as good as something costing 5 times the price. I play my guitar through a pod XT and it sounds easily good enough for my purposes.

The M-Audio 2496 is about £55 new - you don't get as many features for your money (e.g. no EAX support, no headphone amp), but you don't need to spend a fortune; as with most things it's diminishing returns. I also use a Pod XT (actually the rack mount version, but it's the exact same sounds as the bean) for guitar and it's pretty damn good. I'm sure a Fractal Audio Axe-FX is better but it costs roughly 5 times as much - is it 5 times better? (personally I didn't think so listening to the sample clips, but I'd love to have a play with one)

Latency (hearing yourself in real-time) is more about driver technology, how many buffers and how big they are rather than sample rate, although higher sample rates can give lower latencies if the buffers are a fixed size. My "pro-audio" firewire interface (a TC Electronic Digital Konnekt x32) is a dog in that respect - it just will not reliably operate below ~20ms latency each way (and I have tried all the tricks and have a supposedly decent Fireware chipset). It cost £1200 new and it annoys me every time I try to use it as a firewire device (although that wasn't the feature I bought it for). Just goes to show!

[Swiller]

Got an audiophile 2496 and have to agree on sound quality after owning the creative stuff. Crystal clear digital audio is its forte. Added bonus is the reliability and latency times if yer into the studio thing.

They will not try to fix bad recordings, but make the good ones stand out.

Payed £80 for mine a while back and still think its vfm. Seen em go on e bay for a tenner.

[NFS]

Originally Posted by Shadow

The M-Audio 2496 is about £55 new - you don't get as many features for your money (e.g. no EAX support, no headphone amp), but you don't need to spend a fortune; as with most things it's diminishing returns. I also use a Pod XT (actually the rack mount version, but it's the exact same sounds as the bean) for guitar and it's pretty damn good. I'm sure a Fractal Audio Axe-FX is better but it costs roughly 5 times as much - is it 5 times better? (personally I didn't think so listening to the sample clips, but I'd love to have a play with one)

Latency (hearing yourself in real-time) is more about driver technology, how many buffers and how big they are rather than sample rate, although higher sample rates can give lower latencies if the buffers are a fixed size. My "pro-audio" firewire interface (a TC Electronic Digital Konnekt x32) is a dog in that respect - it just will not reliably operate below ~20ms latency each way (and I have tried all the tricks and have a supposedly decent Fireware chipset). It cost £1200 new and it annoys me every time I try to use it as a firewire device (although that wasn't the feature I bought it for). Just goes to show!

The creative software has a 'mode switcher' with settings for 'game', 'entertainment' and 'audio creation' modes. In entertainment mode there is significant latency. Switching to 'audio creation' reduces it and switching the sample rate to 96khz gets rid of it completely (in so far as my ears can detect). I have no idea what the software is doing in order to achieve this, I just know it works.

In honesty, I didn't specifically buy the card for this purpose, I wanted better sound in games and to improve music playback, but I'm glad it has this feature.

As an 'all rounder' for the money I'm very happy with it, but I'm sure there are better products out there for specific needs.

The pod-xt is fantastic though.