Ordered a Vortex2 (au8830a Dell card). Going to install when and if I receive it. Read some reviews and articles and it just seems like a better card vs the Live!. A3D1+2 (3?), multiband equalizer, and EAX 1.0 in hardware is pretty sweet. Even for Dos it's sweet and has to be one of the better ones when considering ISA cards (no emm386, no ddma needed, and native daughterboard with no hanging note bug); even if FM synthesis isn't good it still is sweet.
EDIT:
Card arrived today (Saturday afternoon). Installed latest drivers linked somewhere on these forums (hehe), and it works great! Don't have any crackling or popping whatsoever, but I'm on 98SE. I'm using A3D by itself in Half Life (EAX disabled), and have reverb engine set to highest quality in A3D control panel. Using studio headphones with speaker mode @ headphones, and It sounds better to my ears VS the EAX with Live! card (haven't double checked but who knows). It's very clean, realistic, things actually sound like they go behind you, and echo's nicely in hallways (@ the part where scientist hanging from elevator falls and you jump into elevator; can hear metal thumps and attacks go down entire elevator shaft with very creepy echo. Cool!). Despite setting equalizer to "ROCK" with treble slider bumped all the way, there's no clipping.
For the record I'm using an au8830A2 chipset (smaller 2 channel card with 8 pin SPDIF; SPDIF better allow input). Also have IOMMU enabled in mobo bios.
Have problem with card however which I'm very upset about right now (should put this in another thread). Cannot get DOS sound to work at all! Have no sound blaster emulation settings in Windows 98SE whatsoever (nothing in device manager either, supposedly there's supposed to be a SB emulation driver shown). Manually specified settings in au30dos.ini (set file to read-only since it always changes) and card does initialize in real-mode DOS (can hear audible thump) and au30dos.com shows resources (set low dma to default of 0x3). Despite having set blaster line, games will not detect card whatsoever (mortal kombat trilogy has auto-detect feature which works great but even that doesn't find it). Dos games don't work in Win 98SE DOS shell either (which sucks since A3D control panel lets me choose yamaha sw-70xg for DOS shell midi; wonder if it'd let me choose timidity with 1GB pat-set?!). I think this card absolutely hates my guts right now.
EDIT 2:
After reinstalling the 2048 driver, it complained about not being on the primary PCI slot. Didn't know the card had a mind of its own! So I moved the card to the primary slot (only two on my mobo; see sig), and now the game port, mpu401, sbpro emulator, and other thing showed up in device manager. Very nice! Perhaps it really knows what it's talking about. Unfortunately, sbpro in real-mode DOS still does not work despite matching sbpro IRQ/DMA values in device manager. I guess it's similar to nmi-ddma issue with the Live! card? Windows 98SE DOS shells do have terrific SBPro emulation however. It's a lot better than Live! WDM sbpro emulation (that has a stupid 0.20ms sound lag in some DOS games); Vortex2 with 2048 driver has no lag and appears to be absolutely perfect. Control panel even let's you choose software synthesizers you've installed, to use with 98SE DOS shell midi. Very nice indeed! 2048 driver also supports downloading soundfonts for the card to use as wavetable midi (in addition to DLS and something else; als?).
My only gripe is Linux support lags behind the Live! card. For some reason, only a wavetable daughterboard can be used when plugged into the card. Don't even know if that means an external midi module can be used with the gameport (sometimes cards have the wavetable header hardwired to the game port so I don't know). Onchip wavetable with soundfont and DLS support is completely null under Linux. That sucks!