Creative speakers and soundcards...

[liquidsnake718]

Is creative a good brand? I used to have the sound blasters way back when it was cool to hear "sound" rather than beeps from the computer in Wolfenstein 3d. Is the brand still of good quality or are Altec Lansing, Bose, and Logitech better? How about for speakers?

 

[darkjuggalo2000]

sweet

 

[liquidsnake718]

Just Buy Lansing

 

[darkjuggalo2000]

lansing is good but the 7.1 logtech was compared to a bose 450 dollar 7.1 setup and and the comparison was so close it was unbelievable. keep in mind that the logtech is 75 dollars at walmart

 

[astrallite]

Bose are small lifestyle speakers, they were never made to sound good. Even $4,000 Acoustimass systems are sonically unimpressive.

 

[MEgamer]

man why does bose even try....
u see reviews by tiger direct, saying that the only company out there with the best LOOKING speaker is bose.... they clearly parid him to say that...

bose makes one of teh most ugliest speaker in the world.

 

[thefivetheory]

Personally, I tried switching from a Creative X-Fi Titanium (the PCI-E version) to an Asus Xonar DX, but so far am unimpressed to the point that I'm going back to the X-Fi (which was a big disappointment, given how crappy the Creative drivers/support are... thankfully the daniel_k drivers help).

To elaborate... I use Tritton AX 720 headphones which require Dolby Digital (Live). Although the Xonar DX supports it, it has an obnoxious habit of popping whenever starting a new application with sound. Also, in some (new!) games there is a really weird/distracting echo, like the person speaking is in a small room... this happens to great extent to me in Dragon Age, and is actually really annoying.

In any case, I love Asus in general and would really love to use/support their product, but for some reason the Creative's DDL just works and sounds great, where the Asus has some issues.

Note that I haven't tried analog connections since I'm using the Trittons...

In any case, to the OP, it's all up to you really. Check some reviews, but just try something. If you don't like it, return it for something else.

 

[astrallite]

Well Bioware isn't known for its technical expertise lol and both Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 are glitchy as hell.

 

[liquidsnake718]

Well Bioware isn't known for its technical expertise lol and both Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 are glitchy as hell.

I have yet to install mass effect 2 on my pc, but how is it glitchy, soundwise or graphicswise? Or is the game in general glitchy?

 

[khubani]

I've never had a good experience with Creative's soundcards, especially the newer ones, I've run into alot of driver issues especially considering that Creative doesn't often release driver updates for their soundcards (more specifically, x-treme gamer series)...I could be wrong here but that's just my personal experience

 

[thefivetheory]

I haven't actually found Dragon Age to be at all glitchy. And the only glitch I saw in ME2 was an occasional (uncommon) clipping issue where I'd end up stuck in the air and have to reload. This was before any of the patches, too. Not sure if it's been addressed but it wasn't a huge problem, especially with how ME2 auto-saves for every "mission."

 

[Rooslin]

i was looking at a creative x-fi titanium card but after reading all the posts i was wondering what card you guys would recommend instead. the only thing is that i heard that creative is good for gaming with there eax tech and etc and since iam building my rig for gaming purposes iam kinda stuck ont he fence i guess

my motherboard is the ASUS P6X58D i heard it had good onboard sound would that be good enough (i need an optical out)

 

[englandr753]

I seriously think you will be happy with the onboard sound. Theres very few cases it wouldn't be good enough even for an avid gamer. Sound cards were more important back in the P4 and prior days to help offload some workload to the cpu. Todays cpus arent burdened by processing onboard sound like previous generation cpus. I think sound cards will fall the way of the dinosaur eventually. The last end users that may need a good sound card would be someone that produces music or some other high end audio...

 

[astrallite]

I haven't actually found Dragon Age to be at all glitchy. And the only glitch I saw in ME2 was an occasional (uncommon) clipping issue where I'd end up stuck in the air and have to reload. This was before any of the patches, too. Not sure if it's been addressed but it wasn't a huge problem, especially with how ME2 auto-saves for every "mission."

The new 1.03 patch has tons of people crashing every 15-30 minutes, and the DLC items that people pay for either don't show up at all, or occasionally show up. What a mess.

 

[liquidsnake718]

well then what is the best board that has onboard sound, is there such a thing or do all onboard sound drivers and cards sound the same?

 

[englandr753]

What speakers are you running? This will depend LARGELY on what you are trying to use as a speaker system.

You want to put corvette wheels on a corvette, not chevette wheels on a corvette or visa versa...

 

[drizzt396]

How do y'all get around a lack of CMS? Granted most music is only stereo mixed, but listening to it when its forced-surround is pretty sick.

 

[liquidsnake718]

man why does bose even try....
u see reviews by tiger direct, saying that the only company out there with the best LOOKING speaker is bose.... they clearly parid him to say that...

bose makes one of teh most ugliest speaker in the world.

Bose speakers are good looking and have decent sound quality, they are not focused on the PC gaming market however...

Their speakers are good looking because simplicity is their game...

 

[liquidsnake718]

Lets say if you connect your PC via the sound card to your Mixerfor vinyl, would a creative xi-fi be good enough to let out crisp sound?

 

[p1n3apqlexpr3ss]

Frankly my... 5ish year old sony 2.0 250w stereo system still going sweet (whenever eminems curtain call album came out) and is completly sweet just hooking up to my dell laptop, everything sounds good.
My opinion bout soundcards/speakers, is always this, always better investing in speakers than a sound card, whats the point of 300$ sound card if you dont have decent speakers?

 

[astrallite]

Bose is good because they are simple. That is correct. That's why women love them. They are called WAF speakers (wife acceptance factor). I don't think anyone whose ever listened to a competing brand is going to claim Bose speakers SOUND any good, however.

 

[p1n3apqlexpr3ss]

haha nice point astra, as for the bose quality, one set i heard of them sounded orgasmic... no i havent compared them to equivalent home theatre setups however

 

[astrallite]

The Acoustimass systems I heard in Best Buy sounded like clock radios. The Magnolia room was like 15 feet away. Best Buy definitely didn't do their homework. The Bose system was too close to the home theater speakers, some of which were cheaper than Bose. Suffice to say, not many people stayed long at the Bose booth.

 

[MEgamer]

so bose sucks???

answer: yes

dont even bother argueing you know it is.

 

[liquidsnake718]

Frankly my... 5ish year old sony 2.0 250w stereo system still going sweet (whenever eminems curtain call album came out) and is completly sweet just hooking up to my dell laptop, everything sounds good.
My opinion bout soundcards/speakers, is always this, always better investing in speakers than a sound card, whats the point of 300$ sound card if you dont have decent speakers?

Absolutley, I used to connect my panasonic cd player with 1000watts via my old pentium 4 PC 7 years ago and it had crazy aounds and my old sound card was useful, a bit overkill but warcraft, age of mythology, half life 2 and doom were great on that, not to mention far cry

 

[liquidsnake718]

Best answer selected by liquidsnake718.