new (used) sound card

[blakerwry]

I'm in the market for another sound card... I need something pretty basic and was probably going to order off ebay or get something overstock or on clearance if possible...

I was thinking about getting another Fortissimo II because the one I got from Clocker works great, the control panel/mixer for it (while not very pretty) is easy and quick to setup and change speaker modes, etc. And I love the DIN cable... it is so much easier than plugging my 6 cables into my TBSC and having to disconnect/reconnect them if I pull out my computer. The fortissimoII usually garners a 9 out of 10 in reviews.

The fortissimo II also sports very low CPU usage from older benchmarks I've seen of the card(quakeIII/Unreal Tourney)... But I'm wondering if the 64 hardware voice limitation is going to catch up with me....

What are the 'voices' used for, anything other than 3D gaming? (I assume each 'voice' is just a sperate sound that can be overlapped into the mix... ) How many voices are needed for current games?

My other option is to use a Philips Acoustic edge... I've heard good things about this card, but it hasn't done as well in benchmarks or reviews. But has 96(?) voice support that may help out in the future...

Both cards go for about the same price on ebay ($25-$35 after shipping)

Which of these cards (or should I get a different card?) would be better?

 

[Mercutio]

Hardware voice support is used to play back multiple waveforms at once. In regular daily use, this means being able to do things like listen to an MP3 and play back a video file with sound at the same time, while still getting the "dings" and "clicks" the OS normally makes. In general, I'd say there's an upper limit on the utlity of multiple hardware voices outside of gaming.

That said, I've used Philips Avenger cards before, and in general my impression of them was slightly more favorable than my impression of the Santa Cruz and its ilk.

They're your ears. I don't know what good a "sound benchmark" is.

 

[blakerwry]

well, i think the Fortissimo and TBSC sound very similar... I think the TBSC is rated to 20bit output by it's codec... but so is the fortissimo (4 channel 20bit output and 2 channel 18bit input)

The one thing i noticed about the TBSC was that it's direct sound output was much quieter than the normal WAV out (I had to turn the volume up almost double for the sound level to be equal) This really only efected winamp which started to use direct sound output as the default... all my games had an in-game volume adjustment so it wasn't neccessary to adjust my volume for these.

This was just more of an annoyance when I turned up my sound to listen to an mp3 and ICQ or something dinged really loud.

Maybe if I had both sound cards in the computer at the same time I could compare them, but since I dont notice a difference for MP3's or for Halflife it really doesnt matter.. I don't think I could tell which card is which in a blind test.

While to Acoustic Edge might offer better sound quality I have continued to find evidence that either the card or it's drivers caused major FPS slowdowns (as much as 20%) in common games such as quake3 and unreal Tourney when compared to other cards such as the fortissimoII.


I think I will get the fortissimo II, considering that I think 64 sounds at once is plenty for my ears to have to cope with... if I need more sounds I can do them in software.