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Nimbuz
join:2000-10-14
Earth

Nimbuz

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Sound Blaster Live vs. Santa Cruz

Greetings,

Based on what I read in one review and Santa Cruz Faq, I am going to miss the bells and whistles of Sound Blaster Live! Card. Those four awesome games and the Live Drive.

"Is it just my motherboard and chipset? Unfortunately no. Users of a wide cross-section of motherboards with Ali V, Via and even Intel i815 and 440BX chipsets have experienced one or more of these issues."

"What causes the awful crackling? It appears to be a combination of several factors, ranging from poor hardware and driver design on the part of Creative Labs to other factors such as ACPI. A very simplified explanation is that unless the card is allowed to hog the PCI bus when it wants to output sound, the sound stream is subject to sporadic interruption and this is what you hear as crackling. If you have a high performance video card, which utilizes the memory bus heavily, the chances are quite high that you’ll experience crackling with a Live! card."

How high is the volume when the crackling is audible?

SoundBlaster-VIA Solution Coming? Is it worth the wait for the fix? hmm.....

Santa Cruz is brighter and clearer than Sound Blaster Live according to one review. I wonder how bright and clear Santa Cruz would be. How kewl are both cards to gamers' ears? Which one would you recommend?

New Home Built System Update:

Antec SX1030 + PP303X PSU
Asus A7V133 VIA Apollo KT133A Retail
AMD T-Bird 1.2GHz 266FSB Retail
Arctic Silver II Thermal Compound 3grams
Taisol CGK742092 Cooler (Socket A)
Crucial 256 SDRAM 133 CL2
ATI Radeon 64MB DDR 4X AGP VIVO Retail
MITSUMI Floppy Drive 1.44MB 3.5inch
Aopen DVD 1240 12X/40X Retail
Maxtor DiamondMax Hard Drive 7200 RPM ATA100 (40GB or 60GB)
Voyetra Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or Creative Lab Sound Blaster Platinum 5.1

Thanks in advance

L0wBall
join:2001-03-23
Minneapolis, MN

L0wBall

Member

I currently have a SB Live! Value card on an Asus A7V and have experienced none of this "crackling" that you describe. I got this card after my Aureal Vortex 2 died and caused my computer to lock up upon playing sound. I would recommend any Sound Blaster card, as I still have a Sound Blaster 16 PnP ISA card still in use today. Not to say that the Santa Cruz wouldn't be a decent card, it's just my recommendation.

AllAlone0
join:2000-10-30
Oakville, ON

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Re: Sound Blaster Live vs. Santa Cruz

the SB Live! chips are programmable, which is why they are so damned good. They are a step above anything else on the market, and since it is aa very widely used card, chipset designers should be looking at compatibility. I have an Aladin V chipset, never had a single problem with it though. The soundcard seems to be the only thing I haven't been able to screw up by messing around with stuff.

Chemcat
@bellsouth.net

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I have sb live value cards on an Asus K7V and an Asus A7V133. With the K7V I learned to keep the SB live on an unshared slot to avoid problems. Slot 3 on the A7V133 is unshared so that's where I put it from the beginning and have had no problems at all.
T'bird 1ghz
Asus A7V133
256 mg pc 133 Infineon CL2
Power Color GeForce 2 MX 32mg
Sound Blaster Live Value
WD 40g 7200rpm ata 100
Phillips 8x4x24x cdrw

PowerSlave
join:2000-05-27
Barnesville, GA

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I Have the Abit KT7A Raid motherboard ,at first i did not have a problem with the sound blaster live.My mobo went south and i had to replace it so i figured id add the new xgamer 5.1 also.thats when my trouble started ,All would be working then upon a reboot it would loose the windows files i needed for start up.then i would boot off of a floppy and try it that way ,only to find my system files screwed up,other times it would just start to boot into windows and hang ,never completely loading.Safe mode would not work ,I tried all the recomended fixes and patches to no avail.It was doing this in windows 2000 and in 98 as I had a duel boot setup.So I gave in and got the hercules game theater which has the same chip as the santa cruz and did not look back.The funny thing is i did not have the problem with the first mobo and it was the same mobo as the replacement.I did not change anything in between the setups either.I even tried using my normal backups using Norton ghost and they would all do the same BSOD or just not even load windows.
The GTXP is highly rated by all the reviews on the card and sharky is even recommending it over the SBL now.To me the SBL does sound better then the GTXP when listening to my favorite cd`s

strapjock
My Nuts Itch
join:2001-02-16
Richmond, BC

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After shelling out more than $300 Cdn. for the SBLive! original, I'm going to keep using it even though the crackling problem is there. Sometimes it crackles. Sometimes it doesn't...and only at high volumes. Unless I can be thoroughly convinced to use another card (hmm...Phillips Acoustic Edge and Hercules Game Theater come to mind), I guess I'll stick to my SBLive!

L0wBall
join:2001-03-23
Minneapolis, MN

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Okay, I had my first case of this "crackling" this weekend with my SB Live! Value card. I was playing Dirt Track Racing - Sprint Cars and the only noise that was bad was my engine... The other cars around me and the wrecking sounds were fine, but there was just a static sound from my car. I'm going to play around to see if it's just the game or actually the card.

NavSpecWar$
God, Country, Fast Boats
join:2001-03-28
Antioch, IL

NavSpecWar$

Member

here's how I fixed this on my PC

I was having this problem as well when playing MW4 or other games with a lot of bass in the sound. make sure that the bass controls in volume control are turned down to about 1/2 and that the sound is turned down a bit as well. If you have to turn your speakers up, it's not a big deal. I found this was a problem for me and it took care of it.

Just as an FYI, I have a Biostar MBoard and an SB Live XGamer

L0wBall
join:2001-03-23
Minneapolis, MN

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Okay, I'll try that too. If that's the case it sounds like the card is distorting the output, but I can't imagine that it would considering it's not amplified. I have an Asus A7V with my Live! Value, and the big Altec Lansing 45.2 (or whatever it is) power cube speakers. If I remember right I did turn up the bass and treble controls in the volume properties, but don't notice any problems while playing MP3's or anything.

NavSpecWar$
God, Country, Fast Boats
join:2001-03-28
Antioch, IL

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Re: Sound Blaster Live vs. Santa Cruz

If you should happen to use Winamp or another MP3 player that has it's own equalizer built into it, it could be tuning down the bass or volume on it's own, which could be why you don't notice any probs with that.

Seemed to me like the problem was with almost any game that had a lot of loud bass sounds, like MW4 as I stated earlier, as well as Nascar 3, X-Wing Alliance, CS, Need for Speed-High Stakes, etc.