First post, by maximus
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So, I've been searching for a nice Windows 98-compatible sound card for a few years now. My old standby is the Sound Blaster PCI 128, but it's fairly feature-poor (no Soundfonts, sketchy EAX support, etc.). I quickly zeroed in on the Sound Blaster Live! series, but finding the right one has not been easy.
My first purchase was a Sound Blaster Live! model SB0200. If I had done any research beforehand, I would have known this is the infamous Dell OEM model. I never found working Windows 98 drivers for this one, but this was quite a while ago, and my Google-fu skills were not what they are today. It's a crap card, though, and probably not worth my time.
More recently, I decided to try again. My next purchase was a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 model SB0100. I never found working drivers for this one, either. I actually tried this time, but my efforts were confounded by the fact that the SB0100 is apparently an OEM product while Creative only supports retail versions. Drivers written for the EMU10K1-SEF chip don't work with the EMU10K1-SFF. Go figure.
While I was wasting time with the SB0100, I found an official Creative driver package which was supposed to work with the SB0060. This was my next purchase. This time, the drivers actually installed and appeared to work correctly. However, the card I received was physically defective. It produced a loud electronic buzzing sound through the primary output jack. The output jack for the rear speakers didn't have this problem, so I figure it's a bad capacitor or something of that nature. However, I'm not about to replace 30+ tiny capacitors just to find out the problem was caused by something else. I'll be throwing this card away soon.
The SB0060 model turned out to be a winner as far as drivers are concerned, though, so I ordered another one. This one seems to be a keeper. No more buzzing, the drivers seem to be great, and sound quality is pretty impressive. However, maybe I'm getting hypersensitive now, but the noise floor isn't quite as low as I would like, and the EAX effects seem a little... off. Maybe I'm just spoiled to the Audigy 2 ZS I use in my XP machine, though. (That is a very, very nice sound card.)
TL;DR: I bought a bunch of Sound Blaster Live! cards and finally found one that I'm more or less happy with. However, I'm wondering if I've really found the ultimate Windows 98 sound card. Was the SB Live! 5.1 more or less the end of the road for Windows 98 as far as drivers are concerned? Or is there another sound card I should look at?