How many of you are *REALLY* music lovers?

steve,
have you tried an external soundcard?

 

Yes, I bought a really neat Creative Labs SoundBlaster Extigy card that plugs into my USB port.

Unfortunately, I can't install it with my operating system (Windows 98).

So I bought Windows XP Pro Upgrade ...

... which I'm told is unsuitable for my PC as it's only 300MHz.

I'm now prepared to exchange the soundcard and the operating system for a handful of magic beans.

 

Ive run Win 2000 on a 266, so that may help

according to Creative website it will run on 98SE

specs here -

http://uk.europe.creative.com/products/product.asp?prod=301&page=3

 

Yes, it's all a bit of a nuisance because I'm considering offering a room set-up with ETF5 to anyone who loves music enough to buy Seventh Veil speakers.

BTW Michael, I've only used the software so far to measure the speakers - very useful for detecting minor resonances of the drivers (using the 3D high frequency spectral decay plots) which would otherwise take me about 20 years of listening to detect. If I want to measure the in-room response do I just mono up the L and R channels?

Penance, Windows 2000/98SE may be a possibility. Thanks for that. Mind you, I've just seen a drop dead gorgeous HP laptop with a 17" flat screen so I'm saving up my pennies. What do you think of the soundcard?

 

soundcard is good by all accounts

but, do yourself a favour, buy a dell or compaq or toshiba
DONT buy HP.
PM me and ill explain

 

Sorry to be so blunt, but that soundcard sucks. As do all creative soundcards. They are the worst sounding consumer soundcards on the market, and are only suitable for gaming. Can you return it? If so, do it!

You'd be better off with an M-Audio Audiophile USB.

 

<Crunchtinklejanglechrunchchrunchcrunch> "mmmm - 1954 NOS Mullard - lovely - rich and creamy, just the way I like it!"

You're a fan of Philip Glass then - boom boom!!!

Paul - SB cards aren't that bad dude - you should have seen (or rather heard) the piece of crap in my HP before I put Henryt's old SBLive! in it.

Listen to Penance - he is wise. My HP Pavillion has been a pain in the arse since day 1, and their frankly totally w*nk setup discs are a pain - you can't extract all those nice packages if you move up to a newer OS - oh, and my nice large (for my needs) 21 gig HDD is only a 19 now because there's a sodding partition full of all that shite Win98/HP's setup install put there - and I can't access it.

Don't even go there on HP's driver support... Oh, and their own brand of scanner didn't work with that PC either - what a load of crap. Their printers are the only thing they make worth having.

Compaq were good once though - I've got a 1995 486 laptop that's still A1 (barring a dead CMOS battery!) - and the TFT screen on it is brigter than all modern TFTs I've seen, despite it only being a 10 incher with 256 colours...

 

Oh the things i could tell you about HP gear
but i wont, suffice to say i wanna keep my job
Good for tape drives/mass storage
best not mention the other stuff.
Dom, you think the support is bad, you should try it when you work there

 

Hey dom, trust me when I say that Soundblaster cards ARE that bad, and I speak from experience. The sound quality of them is uninspiring and thats about as polite as I can be about it. Sure its better than onboard, but not by much, and thats also because onboard sound in many cases is bad, but most onboard chipsets these days sound better than Soundblasters.

The last soundblaster I had was a Live. They are not much worse than Audigy's as far as sound quality goes (and an Extigy is basically an Audigy 1), and it sounded crap.

As for HP, well yes I agree that a lot of their products are crap - they really have went downhill. We have a number of printers here with known issues that result in their complete failures, and big expensive colour laser printers that do not even work properly with the correct drivers (a good example being the Colour Laserjet 8550 whose Windows XP driver doesnt work, and you have to use the 8500 driver instead).

In fact I sit here right now struggling to get their latest crap product a Business Inkjet 1100 to work in Windows XP.

 

Paul, I'll certainly take your word for it when you say that the Soundblaster cards are crap for hi fi. For the ETF5 measurement system this shouldn't matter, as the software measures the output of the card and subtracts it from the net results.

If I want to use my PC with my music system you recommend the M-Audio Audiophile USB card? It looks interesting (but still wouldn't work on my WIN 98). Are there any other players in the audiophile USB market that you know of?

 

Hi 7v, I'm not really up to speed with external soundcards, but the M-Audio will be a safe bet. The DAC in the M-Audio cards is said to be very similar to the DAC in the ART D/IO DAC, which certainly aint too bad.

 

It worked, I guess, in my Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 with W98...

 

Hi all,
right, I thought it time to stick my oar in to all of this... SoundBlaster cards are not all crap. The Live! was particularly bad (I had one) and the Audigy although a little better was no where near as good as it should have been. The Audigy 2 though is a different kettle of fish... it is what the Audigy should have been. I have ran a few tests using RightMark Audio Analyser and the results were all pretty good in comparison to similarly priced cards.

The other thing is that I find the drivers are very bloated for the Creative stuff, but you can use the KX Project WDM drivers which are loads smaller, and although I have never done blind testing, sound a little better to me than the standard ones.


The Moog

 

I've got a Tascam US-122 USB audio breakout box (http://www.tascam.co.uk/newproducts/newprod_US122.html) to provide reasonable quality recording and playback facilities to my Tosh Tecra 9100 laptop. The US-122 is actually a decent sounding device - playing a .wav file through it sounds far better than cutting it to CD and playing it on my Marantz DV4100 OSE DVD player! The US-122 sounds a lot more 'ballsy' and involving. Conclusive proof that I currently need a better CD player!

Tony.

 

Hi Moog. Audigy 2 is better, but it still lags behind many consumer based soundcards, like the M-Audio Revolution and Terratec 6fire LITE. The KX drivers have been proven to make significant improvements on older cards.

 

Yeah,
the KX drivers are better on the older ranges, but they have a reasonable release schedule, so support for newer features on the Audigy 2 is getting better all the time... The Creative cards are without doubt primarily gaming cards, but as that is what I mainly use my PC for I don't really have a problem with that, all I am saying is that the Audigy 2 doesn't come off that badly in terms of overall sound quality against other consumer cards.

To be honest, in terms of music playback I only really use the PC as an MP3 jukebox when I am having people over or a party as background sound rather than seriously listening to music... it is in my listening room and there is too much noise interference from the PC itself to consider it as hifi, both from the fans (case, PSU, GFX card, CPD etc) even though they are all "silent" and from the crackling of the hard drives. The case itself is even silenced, and although not really noticable normally, it makes itself known during any quiet sections of the music... Once you know what it sounds like, your ears automatically tune into it...


The Moog

 

Mr 7V. Stop pissing around with PCs and get a mac, you seem the creative type, designs his own things etc.

A mac is what you need, you know it, I know it.

www.apple.com

 

Oh dear Garyi,

next you'll be telling us that they are the fastest personal computers in the world (just like the Apple advert did before it was banned...)

How can anyone any more creative using a Mac over a PC? Surely the creativity is in the person, not the tools they use to express it.


The Moog

 

Maybe if you would be a more creative person you would answer your question by yourself.

 

Moog, you sound like the kind of person thats never used Mac.

Creativity is enhanced when there is nothing in your way stopping you. PCs stops you. (IMO of course)