I dont think I mean 16 bit were 16 bit. Creative was calling 16 bit cards 24 bit cards. Thats what I meant.
When I started to play with VOX tweaking and special Vox F/X I learned right away that most of the 44.1 or 48Khz cards are not up to processing F/X. I even asked one of our audio gurus about it and he suggested what I was experiencing was impedance problems but it turned out it was sampling rate conversions (SRC) that were going on behind the scenes. Both Live! and Audigy (also Audigy2) are guilty of SRC both pre and post processing which is what makes the latency issues worse than they should be (this information comes from Martin Walker at
www.soundonsound.com). For gaming we dont really need very good sound cards but they have to be great at what they are (supposedly) designed to do (gaming) and for the purposes of vox they MUST be low latency.
This is the way audio processing works on a card designed to offload processing to the cpu as it was explained to me (and sound gurus forgive me if I get this off a bit): If you are flying and chatting with a few friends and you are all in the same plane then the actual sounds loaded in the background are fairly easy to work out and your cpu is having an easy time of it. Then you come into a fight and suddenly there are a lot more friendlies and enemies too and the audio files for all the various planes are loaded and processed through the cpu BUT the cpu was only using a small portion of its capability for audio before and now the requirements are three times higher. So what happens is every thing hits the mud and slows down and you see it as if the computer hit a brick wall. Your screne freezes and audio pauses and then even when it comes back its slow and jerky and then finally it smooths out when the cpu has enough room made available for the audio. Nasty!
So you want a card that can handle all of its own processing without requiring anything out of the CPU. I think there are only two SBs even capable of that and even they use too much CPU. If you are doing any type of vox F/X you want to be able to get to at least 24 bit and 96 Khz. If you dont care about vox F/X you can get away with 24 bit and 44.1 Khz. 16 bit introduces far too much noise and increases the likelihood of other problems (noise will destroy your speakers for one thing). The human voice is like a musical instrument in a lot of ways and so you should allow as much sampling as possible and from what I have learned in playing with F/X you wan to use as much as your card and your system can handle. So even though I point to the Striker as a great card (it is) I intend to use the Claro Halo XT for F/X. The reason is that it can reach 192 Khz which with the new Miles system should allow great vox F/X (lets see).
The problems I have with Creative still hold though. They advertised falsely on at least three of their cards. Their cards are noisy and introduce too much latency (latency is never a good thing but terrible in combat gaming) and they use far too much CPU.
Now having said that you should also know that probably the reason you dont have problems with Sound Blaster is that you dont have SLI or an Nvidia chipset and you probably have a fast enough system that when the smaller problems pop up they are not as obvious. Well I should also tell you that you must have a faster system in order to make use of higher sampling rates or you will run into the same problems.
Now Skuzzy can correct anything I got wrong but dont waste money on this junk anyway... times are tough and the price of one card could feed you for a month.
