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Soundcard Advice


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Ive seen people offer advice on which soundcard is best with the ProMedias. Some say the SBLive!, the Hercules XP, the Philips AE, or the Audiophile 2496.

Im leaning towards getting the Audiophile 2496 for now, and upgrading to either the SBLive! 5.1 or the Philips AE. You see, right now I am looking to transfer vinyl over to 24bit 96Khz files, and I cant find any consumer grade soundcards that support 24bit recording. So it would seem the Audiophile 2496 will be neccessary to do those transfers.

Somewhere down the line, I was wanting to buy the 4.1's to go along with my 2.1's to do the 6.2 setup. I was planning on using a soundcard with 5.1 ANALOG output for that, which is why I was looking to upgrade to the other cards mentioned.

My question then, is do any of you know of a soundcard that offers 5.1 analog output AND 24 bit recording, either currently out, or on the horizon? If not, does anyone have advice on what I should do about my situation?

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The Santa Cruz is pretty good. I got one on loan from a friend. Replaced my MX300 Vortex 2 soundcard. Overall impression:

a) Troublefree installation for win98

B) Excellent sound quality. MP3 sounds more dynamic, DVD great and 3D sound in gaming is nice too. Only thing I miss is A3D 2 (which is only supported by Vortex 2) in games like Half-Life. But then, there's no more A3D 2 games being developed now, so...

c) Lots of neat effects to play with as the card comes with Sensuara's MacroFX and EnvironmentFX. Still having fun trying them out.

d) Overall impression: well worth the new price of $70 that we can get around nowadays.

Only caveat: Because it has so many ports at the back of the card, the versajack is situated right at the end of the card. This is normally not a problem, but my colorcase has a plastic moulding over the usual metal frame. Thus it is difficult to connect to the Versajack in my case as the plastic moulding partly obscures the jack.

Personally, I'll prefer to see the

gameport go - afterall, all newer joysticks and controllers are USB nowadays

anyway.

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