Quote Originally Posted by imagoon
They are actually. The EMU101K is the same chip on all 3. The code from the the audigy can be loaded on to the live card and the card then appears as audigy. Also the pin outs for the live drive and audigy drive is identical. I have a sblive, optical card from hoontek installed on the audigy with no mods. So I really must ask you what are the real diffrences from the live, audigy and audigy 2? The firmware on the card. They added a few signal filters on the card to but logic wise nothing. It is annoying me because I can find the page where they showed this. They removed a small 16(?) pin eeprom from the card (upper left I think) and loaded audigy code into it. Reinstalled. They did it with several diffrent versions. Things of note: All of the "new" sampling rates on the audigy where enabled, ie 24khz, 44.1 khz, 96khz etc that was not available on the live worked fine. All of the new voices worked fine, all the enviroment effects worked, the point was the entire card was 100% logically an audigy. So compare the card to the live. The audigy is the same card. Look at the part number on the main CPU (EMU101K) and note they are the same.....

Also to top it all off, linux uses the exact same driver to drive the cards.

This showes all the creative type cards from the value to platnum live as identical:

http://www.ilikediy.com/product/soundcard/sound1.htm


~Chris
Thank you for explaining this to me. Unfortunatly the website you linked is in chinese so I was unable to read enought of it to make any sense of it. My knowledge of soundcard technology is very limited.

I actually was just looking at this article at Tom's Hardware http://www6.tomshardware.com/game/20030405/index.html that compares my onboard sound to a Audigy 2. Apparently my onboard sound is better than an Audigy 2. <laugh> I know if you go to Asus's website it says my board should be the Realtek ALC650 but it isn't. The sound drivers on their download page do not work for my sound. I have to download the motherboard unified driver from Nvidia and install it's sound drivers to get it to work. I have submitted a question to Asus about this. I also checked my MB to verify that I do not have the ALC650 chip. I could not locate it. Only the Nvidia chips. I think before I buy the Terratec card ($130) I am going to investigate sound cards alot more. In the meantime the Onboard Sound produced the least amount of noise in my game so it will do for now.

Thanks,
Eric

P.S. If you have another soundcard that you really like please post it's reviews for me to look at.