The Santa Cruz has excellent sound quality; it makes an effort at supporting a good variety of API's, but my impression is that it's a bit flaky.

The Live's EAX has wide support, but it's not a really great effect until the Audigy brought EAX 3.0. Except for EAX support, SoundFonts if you want them instead of a decent MIDI board, and possibly SPDIF CD audio support, the Vortex2 is better here for 98SE. A3D 2.0 is supported by a nice bunch of titles, and no other cards do it right. If you can also cover EAX with a later PC, I think it's an easy decision.

You could try both, and then just see what one you use most. I suggest doing it like this: Install both, when you use an EAX game switch to the Live, and keep it that way until you switch to an A3D game. After a week or two, keep whichever you one you've had the most time with.

No reason you can't just keep both in too :p

Isn't the A3D also EAX compatible ?(early versions of it obviously)

firage wrote:

The Santa Cruz has excellent sound quality; it makes an effort at supporting a good variety of API's, but my impression is that it's a bit flaky.

Great job! You tried really hard! Here's your participation trophy!

That's what that sounded like 🤣

So by flaky, are you meaning that it does an OK job supporting EAX, A3D, etc.? Not bad, not great?

SRQ wrote:

No reason you can't just keep both in too :p

That's three sound cards! Isn't that like crossing the streams?

Actually, I had given the thought of having the Audician always do MIDI in Windows via Dreamblaster and being there for DOS games. I would have the Vortex2 inside the case and then use the external Extigy. I had thought about using a SB Live instead but now maybe a Santa Cruz. So I was also thinking three cards. 😀

I also did think about the Audigy2 ZS but I was going to put one in a XP build.

GiSWiG wrote:

Great job! You tried really hard! Here's your participation trophy! […]
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firage wrote:

The Santa Cruz has excellent sound quality; it makes an effort at supporting a good variety of API's, but my impression is that it's a bit flaky.

Great job! You tried really hard! Here's your participation trophy!

That's what that sounded like 🤣

So by flaky, are you meaning that it does an OK job supporting EAX, A3D, etc.? Not bad, not great?

Yes, well... 😀 It does early EAX and A3D 1.0 in addition to DirectSound, which is better versatility than most things. Just too bad it's not all smooth; depending on the game there's missing sounds, glitches and such. It's been about 15 years since I've last used a Sensaura card, though. I have one of these somewhere that I've never even tested out.

Well, all that time, all I used was Creative (good marketing team!). I never used anything else until the on-board sound of the A7N8X-E Deluxe.

IMO you want a Vortex 2 for A3D games and you want an Audigy 2 for your EAX needs. EAX doesn't work acceptably with any Aureal driver, and Creative's A3D emulation similarly might as well not exist.

Why Audigy 2? It has noticeably better output signal quality than Live or Audigy 1. There are Win9x VXD drivers available for Audigy 2. You don't want to use the WDM drivers because there will be problems with sound in some games. This is the case with all Creative cards.

The other cards, like Santa Cruz (Crystal DSP), ESS Maestro/Solo/etc, VLSI Thunderbird, etc all have worse compatibility with EAX / A3D than the makers of the APIs.