Yes, but you're comparing an SB Live, which was made when Creative was still a decent company, to an Audigy budget card, which used subpar components and had super shoddy drivers. :(

As it is my card has kinda old drivers but it works a lot better than my Audigy 4 ever did. 'Cause of its crappy drivers.

That holds true with legacy games that use legacy APIs for sound... In general, sound was improved a lot in Vista / 7.

I wasn't disputing it, it just pains me to see how far they've fallen in that department. I haven't bought a discrete sound card in quite a while and the integrated one I have is pretty good, lack of acceleration aside.

I still remember fondly of the years when they were the best. Even if they did more or less kill off A3D in favor of the inferior EAX.

Overall, the sound is much better. But they completely revised the DirectSound stack to do it (and deprecated it in favor of OpenAL, but many game developers didn't make the switch). A casualty of the revision was hardware acceleration.

In favor of XAudio 2 actually, not OpenAL. OpenAL is done by Creative, or to be precise, was done by Creative, I haven't seen any dev progress for almost few years now.

You're right; it's XAudio 2. Creative did not develop OpenAL, but they took it over from Loki and stifled it. The last release was a year ago, so it is being maintained.

If you want to really move away from the on board shit then you've got more to think about than sound quality. EAX should be a consideration as a lot of games won't offer you the option at all if they don't detect that you have an adequate card (say one that supports EAX3, for instance).

Personally I settled on an Asus Xonar DS, as Creative are pretty crap these days, unfortunately.
I'd probably put the money towards an OS upgrade first then.

At least some updates would have been nice. Now when I think about it, even Microsoft have stopped releasing small updates for DirectX, but I guess they are busy improving XNA.

Aww. I remember when Sound Blasters were the top dogs and choosing anything else was just silly...

sad to hear they fell so low :(

Yeah, I remember those days well too. But they've been relying on brand recognition so long that they're no longer competitive. Their drivers are pretty bad and I don't see how it's half as hard to make a good sound card driver as it is a graphics card driver.

A few years ago I switched from ALC650 to Audigy – ok, it was a bit less noisy, sounded richer but I could hear sound enhancement in specific scenes only in a movie that I was watching multiple times. That’s it. Do not expect improvement similar to switching from cassette tape to CD. Also I didn’t notice any improvement in games performance.

A word of advice if you want to buy Sound Blaster card: IGNORE card names – Live!, Audigy, X-Fi etc. means nothing. You have to use model names SBxxx/CTxxx. SB is known to release a good/expensive cards and than a series of cheaper/crippled cards under the same name – like Audigy LS that didn’t even have the same sound chip ‘real’ Audigy had.

You wrote that you use XP and have $30 to spend. Don’t waste your cash on expensive Audigy – it’s not worth it. I own Audigy 2 ZS (model SB0350) that I purchased for $40 and I tell you it doesn’t sound better than Live! (CT4760 - $8 including delivery) I have now in my PC. Live! has decent sound, will give you ability to use Sound Fonts that will greatly improve midi quality, works well under Windows XP, 98 and DOS – and it is cheap. So my advise: go and buy used SB Live!. Just not any of those new models - but real, old Live! (like SB0060 or SB0100).

If your after a decent value soundcard get a Asus Xonar DG.

Looks up some reviews and forums, it's a well regarded card.

My plain Audigy2 still works in Windows 7. Creative's ALchemy software works well for restoring EAX support. However, with or without ALchemy, there is a lot of slight, unpredictable lag between visuals and sound effects. Sometimes it's prominent, other times it's invisible. Also, microphone input is hopelessly garbled.

Not happy with MS for the imperfect transition, but Creative had it coming. They produced way more than their share of bloated, broken drivers over the years. And imagine how far audio might have evolved if they hadn't sabotaged Aureal. Full rendering of 3D sound environments and surfaces. Instead, we're lucky to have basic positional sound.

I'm looking at the Asus Xonar DG now. It's really quite reasonably priced.

But, I'm still a bit hesitant to fork out money since many of you think there's no need. One example of a problem I have with sounds is, when playing Fallout New Vegas, helmeted characters tend to have a bit of a crackle (not normal) that lasts for a split second before coming out muffled (normal). I thought this has something to do with onboard; can anyone verify this?

Otherwise, if there really isn't a need, then I may just save up and buy something else witht he money.