Live! 5.1 was also popular during the 98/XP migration period but has a bad front channel jack. kX Project can swap front and back for that

A3D always had a sound similar to X-Fi CMSS3D, binaural and highly positional. As long as you're using the VXD drivers on 98, then a TBSC had amazing positional sound with A3D or DS3d.

I never thought the Live! had very good EAX for it's time. It definitely had a lot of environment and room effects, but positional audio wasn't much better than software sound (Miles, etc).

EAX 3/4 on Audigy 2/4 was actually very good and games like BF2 really showed that off well; but at that point you're reaching the end of the XP era.

The Live! drivers were always very buggy, no matter what OS you were on. At least running on pure DOS the SB16 emulation was quite good.

I just ordered of Ebay the following cards

2x Soundblaster AWE64
2x Soundblaster Pro 2
3x Soundblaster 16 (X,C,S,FM)
Live! 5.1
Live! 24Bit
Audigy 2 ZS

duralisis wrote:

As long as you're using the VXD drivers on 98, then a TBSC had amazing positional sound with A3D or DS3d.

Thanks for the tip. Do you mean this driver?:
sc_4193.exe
Santa Cruz DRIVER v. 4193 WDM FINAL for Windows 2000, XP, Millennium, 98se | This is the last and the greatest Driver available.

You should be able to see the VXD drivers on the FTP still or their archive. It's been a while. The last VXD based drivers were 4081.

After a brief search they still have them here:

http://www.turtlebeach.com/support/files/311/

-Audigy/X-Fi have top notch headphone output if that's what you'll use. Aureal's headphone mode is not nearly as nice. Live also has an unimpressive headphone mode, plus there's annoying noise on its front output.

-Using kx drivers means almost no game API support. But by switching the rear jack to front you transform Live's audio quality, and the kx DSP stuff is neato.

-Aureal's XP drivers are not only weak but are basically worthless. They don't support much in the way of 3D audio. In fact there is only one set (stock XP) that even has any acceleration and it is unstable and still missing A3D.

-The unofficial DanielK Audigy Support Packs are excellent. I use my old Audigy 2 ZS in my main i5 2500k desktop on 7x64. My X-Fi Elite Pro doesn't work right on the board's fake PCI bus. The PCI version of X-Fi is very sensitive to any bus issues.

duralisis wrote:

You should be able to see the VXD drivers on the FTP still or their archive. It's been a while. The last VXD based drivers were 4081.

After a brief search they still have them here:

http://www.turtlebeach.com/support/files/311/

Nice, the 4081 drivers seem to have solved my problem running Ultimate Race Pro with sound acceleration enabled.

swaaye wrote:

-Using kx drivers means almost no game API support. But by switching the rear jack to front you transform Live's audio quality, and the kx DSP stuff is neato.

I personally never really cared much for positional audio in games, but what I did enjoy is the good old pure stereo MP3 output (99% of the time that I use a sound card is for MP3) and kxdrivers excel in that area. The output was definitely much better then with generic creative drivers, be it Live! or original Audigy.

swaaye wrote:

-Audigy/X-Fi have top notch headphone output if that's what you'll use. Aureal's headphone mode is not nearly as nice. Live also has an unimpressive headphone mode, plus there's annoying noise on its front output.

Are we specifically talking about gaming positional audio over headphones in that regard?

For that, Aureal's headphone mode wipes the floor with most cards of the day, possibly because Aureal was among the first to leverage binaural HRTF mixing techniques while Creative was pushing quad speakers. (Though I do admit, I haven't tried a Crystal Semi-based card like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz that typically boasted Sensaura Virtual Ear...EAX and A3D support likely would've suffered anyway.)

I don't think Creative bothered with that 'til CMSS-3D Headphone on their X-Fi cards...which is probably based on acquired Aureal and Sensaura tech anyway. (And then they had to go and regress on positional accuracy with THX TSP/SBX Pro Surround...augh.)

God. Why would you want to relive all the "3D" bullshit? Like the bad capacitors, this makes me feel depressed.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

God. Why would you want to relive all the "3D" bullshit? Like the bad capacitors, this makes me feel depressed.

Sound cards may serve as higher-quality DACs now since the circuitry doesn't totally suck, but the real bullshit is that game developers think 7.1 speaker systems in all their two-dimensional glory are good enough for positioning these days.

I want my binaural audio back, goddamnit. Ever since XAudio2 and FMOD Ex took over the game industry back in 2007 and totally displaced OpenAL in the process, the only game that's even attempted to take a crack at it, no sound card needed, is Battlefield 3 with Enhanced Stereo Mode...which especially took me by surprise when BF: Bad Company 2's positioning was utterly terrible even by XAudio2 standards. (Well, I suppose there's the DiRT series with bundled Rapture3D, but that's technically a software OpenAL device that could theoretically work with any OpenAL game, if you're willing to pay up for the User or Advanced editions.)

The rest pretty much force me to make do with pre-mixed 5.1/7.1 that, even with CMSS-3D Headphone, Dolby Headphone, etc., still sounds noticeably inferior to A3D on Vortex2 with headphone mode or DS3D/OAL on X-Fi with CMSS-3D Headphone to my ears.

That blows away any surround speaker system I've ever heard when it comes to shoot-you-in-the-face-through-a-wall soundwhoring, and thus I expect headphones not to be held back to surround speaker system limitations when they can more easily replicate the way we hear things in real life with just two ears.