Poll: Best sound card manufacturer

[JonJon]

let's hear what you guys have to say, sound cards are always ignored.....i added aureal to the list to see how their products stack up against the others.

 

[AndyHui]

Since Aureal is effectively gone, and other manufacturers not particularly noteworthy apart from Yamaha and a few others, there's not much choice other than Creative. I think their drivers are crap, but the hardware is supposed to be good.

Diamond doesn't make sound cards anymore, Turtle Beach/Voyetra may be a possibility.

 

[gittyup]

Might be more along the lines of personal preference. Mine is Creative...

 

[FrogDog]

Creative is for sure the leader in the sound market. Which means they probably are the best.

 

[Vinny N]

Well a MIDI fanatic...and Yamaha makes some of the best sounding banks out there, but at 4-8x the cost of a SB Live, the SW1000XG is hard to justify

So I'll have to vote Creative since no other company has soundcards that have a full range of soundfont capability as well as the compatibility factor. Guillemot use to have some good soundfont supporting soundcards but they're definitely limited compared to Creative's...and Guillemot can't claim the same level of "out of box compatibility" with various OSs that Creative does.

 

[JonJon]

the leader is not always the best

 

[chiwawa626]

Theres proffesional cards made by other companys for recording studios and stuff, i bet these are better

 

[Vinny N]

Better for what? recording stuff? playback? or games?


Now that I think about it, this is a bad poll.

There's no best manufacturer overall unless you're talking about failure rate...

the poll should be more specific, best MIDI, or best gaming, or most/least compatible, best recording, best playback.

A different company would probably lead the polls on each of those.

 

[madthumbs]

I agree that the leader is not always the best. I think Intel is still considered the leader, and Aureal used to blow away Creative before the lawsuit put them under.

 

[Shu8]

i go w/ creative

 

[Riverhound]

I never really looked into sound cards. Maybe since i've never had any problems with mine. I have a turtle beach montego and its worked fine for over two years. I don't think sound cards are very important personally... not much to them. Unless you do a lot of audio editing or something i guess. Do cards like the sound blaster live platinum really do anything better than mine, like make your computer run faster or anything?

 

[Vinny N]

Riverhound:

Yeah actually I think someone did some tests and the SB Live had lower cpu utilizations than the Aureal based cards hehe.

Noticeable difference though? No way. Like you said, if you're not doing something specific like recording, MIDI play/record/create, or need some 3d stuff from the soundcard it's not going to matter which one you have as long as you can play wave audio and mp3s and even then you might not care unless you have high end PC speakers or a high end audio system hooked up to your soundcard.

 

[Wingznut]

1 tie) Turtle Beach
1 tie) Philips
3) Aureal
4) Creative

 

[stso]

I'm using turtle beach, so does my brother.

 

[Niege]

For what I want, SB Live! Value is just fine. However, I agree that this may not be as useful a poll as one where the question was 'What sound card manufacturer do you like and why?'

 

[chuckieland]

i love my sound blaster live value.

 

[airfoil]

My vote goes to Creative! Nothing else comes close to it! My 5.1 platinum rocks!!

 

[rhinox99]

Creative because they made the Live value. it's cheap, sounds decent, it gets the job done

 

[BFG10K]

I have a Yamaha YMF PCI audio card and it works really well. I'm using drivers that are almost a year old and I've had absolutely no sound related problems with them. Plus the drivers are WHQL certified.

 

[Biggs]

I have to go with Creative here. They've been around for long time anyway.

 

[divinemartyr]

A lot of people are saying creative, and a lot of people have good reason to but creative is simply the largest... It wasn't until people starting trying other processors that everyone decided Intel was no longer the best. I've listened to the wave output of several cards, and believe me, I prefer my $26 AOpen AW744Pro over my roommate's $200 Live! Platinum 5.1. Disagree with me if you will but The Santa Cruz, AOpen card, and Philips Acoustic series cards all sound better on wave table output than the Creative cards. Just my personal opinion...

dm

 

[Vinny N]

divinemartyr:

wavetable or waveaudio? If you meant wavetable as in MIDI playback, the Live with it's soundfont capabilities can sound however you want it too, and I'll take that over anything except for a Yamaha SW1000XG.

If you meant waveaudio, I concede

 

[billyjak]

I hear that new Philips soundcard is awesome, thinking about getting it, support for 2,4 or 6 speakers. Suppose to give creative a run for their money.

 

[Rockogre]

I have had Creative labs Sound blaster Awe 64 And it was ok whenit first came out! And then I bought a Creative labs Sound Blaster Live! Value and that was a lot better than the AWE64! Then I recently bought the Sound Blaster Live XGAMMER 5.1 and it rocks even better than the Live value card ever did! So My vote is for CREATIVE LABS ALL THE WAY!

 

[divinemartyr]

Vinny_N:

waveaudio =) Sorry for the confusion.

dm