For me, Audigy, all day, everyday. Doom for example sounds great on it, much better than any Live card in DOS and Win9x games, and with much better drivers also. Go with the .vxd drivers and you're all set. They're both still similarly inexpensive by comparison, so it's a no brainer in my opinion.

I have had multiple revisions of Live cards in multiple builds with various OS, and between signal noise, horrible drivers (tried every single one I could find) and even output level issues even on quality speakers, they're just not worth it for me. On my Win98SE pc every Live driver version I tried was what was keeping the pc from soft restarting in Windows, freezing in the shutdown screen! I only found this out years later, people kindly pointed out it probably was nusb to blame but nope, confirmed. I'm sure you're familiar with Joseph Joestar's tutorial to use Audigy drivers with Live cards, which says it all really. How Creative just bailed on good drivers for the Live range is beyond me, what a waste of potential. After years dealing with the issues above, a simple Audigy 2 solved everything in 5 minutes, and with better quality to boot.

For DOS I would say neither. You can get sb pro emulation to work with a lot of games if you run them inside a DOS window, and there are native DOS drivers, but it is emulation and there are always going to be challenges with compatibility. I would pick up something like an awe 64 value and use that to supplement your EAX card.

For windows, the audigy 2 sounds significantly better than anything else you can get for windows 98. When it comes to audio quality and purity is comparable even to a modern PC. With that said, I could never get any creative software suit to work properly with my audigy 2 zs. I always had to manually install the VXD driver within device manager and it left me with a pretty barebones experience. The SB Live! is much more of that era and should give you a more complete and well integrated experience.

So they both have their pros and cons. I still like my Audigy 2, but I have other sound cards that can cover for its weaknesses (like DOS and midi).

The Live is basically a 1st generation Audigy so benefits from extra years of development. I seriously doubt they improved the dos mode driver over the years apart from updating to recognise new cards. (The 2 actually uses modded Audigy 1 drivers as Creative never released any)

Win98 side of things both are a mess re drivers. Audigy2 has the wdm to vxd thing and the Live has the find the right driver for the right card game. But as mentioned Joseph joestar has good guides here on those topics.

For me Live is cheap but if you can stretch the budget a bit more the Audigy 2 is worth it.

Audigy 2 > Audigy > Live!

Nothing significant is gained by downgrading.

Hehe - apart from a gameport 😉

Thanks all - that's helpful

Gameport on Audigy? EZ - just use breakout cable.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-03-04, 06:59:

For windows, the audigy 2 sounds significantly better than anything else you can get for windows 98. When it comes to audio quality and purity is comparable even to a modern PC.

Would you say that the Audigy 2 (ZS) is still better than a Diamond Monster Sound MX300, audio quality wise?

mrzmaster wrote on 2023-03-06, 20:36:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-03-04, 06:59:

For windows, the audigy 2 sounds significantly better than anything else you can get for windows 98. When it comes to audio quality and purity is comparable even to a modern PC.

Would you say that the Audigy 2 (ZS) is still better than a Diamond Monster Sound MX300, audio quality wise?

Absolutely, big difference, even when using digital audio outputs on both cards. I use my A3D card for the few native windows games that have midi, but otherwise I exclusively use the audigy 2zs.