Nforce2 vs SBLive!

Greetings,

I have an 8KTA3 and an SBLive and I am still plagued with Snap,
Crackle and Pop while gaming. Has a reliable fix been found?

I have also been considering an upgrade to an Nforce2 board and
ditching the SBLive. I have seen posts stating the Nforce2 is more
sound stable, etc. But what about features like the mixer, soundfont
and enviroments?

Can I select/use more than 1 recording input at the same time (like SB
AWE32) or a What-U-Hear (SBLive) equivalent?

Are there realtime effects and fine tuning that can be applied to
inputs like the SBLive?

Will the board play more than 1 wav channel at same time? Example: I
can run Roger Wilco, use a Txt to Speech app, play .wav AND and mp3
simultaniously. And yes I *do* need to have this feature.

Are my old Chaos soundfonts usable with it or am I stuck with a 2mb
hardwired wavetable?

Since this will be a major upgrade as I have to change mem, MB, video
card (and might as well get a 2600 XP chip to replace the aging Athlon
750) I really need to know about the sound features not shown on the
boxes or any website that I have seen.

Thanks,

Greb

 

Yes, either you are experiencing driver issues, in which updates can and do
correct this. Or you are experiencing PCI latency issues in which either
colliding IRQ's or PCI bus hogging is not allowing the SB Live! to get the
time it needs to do what it needs to do to get uninterrupted audio out.

Unsure as to what is your root cause, I can only tell you that, as a rule,
patched OS'es and hardware drivers have addressed this systemic issue
(meaning the global issues that have caused this are generally fixed) but
not system specific issues, such as a misconfiguration or hardware specific
dealio with your PC.

If you are running an NT based OS, shame on you if you aren't, update your
bios, d-load the latest DX and kernel patches, fix any obvious BIOS boogums,
and you should be ok. If not, you're going to have to get the fine toothed
comb out.

Better than Creative's offerings for the Live!, but inferior to the Audigy 2
and other current hardware, such as the M-Sound 7.1.

Multiple recoring inputs are not possible reliably with WDM drivers, ASIO
drivers are required, you need to ensure that whatever solution you require
will run ASIO drivers.

These questions are more related to audio hardware and even the SoundStorm
offering by Nvidia, implimented by Epox, will not meet your criteria.

I suggest an NForce2 based board and an Audigy 2. The extra cost is not
significant, but the extra funcitonality is infinite.

 

Install the latest BIOS for your motherboard, grab the latest SBLive!
drivers and make absolutely sure that the card has its own IRQ (i.e.
not shared with anything else.) If you're still having trouble and
are running Windows 9x, bite the bullet and get Windows XP.

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Paul Taylor Veni, vidi, tici -
I came, I saw, I ticked.