Not sure why you are having issues finding this info, it's REALLY well documented all over the web. This is 20 year old tech you know...🤣 not being snarky, just an observation.

I also explained the differences in another topic around here somewhere...Ahh here it is.
The Live! is better than a Vortex 1 in pretty much every regard. A Vortex 1 does not support the features of A3D 2.0 and is a 1.0 card only.

In general A3D 1.0 only offers HRTF on 8 audio sources and these are rendered in software. No reverb support at all.
A3D 2.0 gives a whole slew of new features like Occlusions, Hardware HRTF, WaveTraced reflections and some other neat 3D audio features. EAX not supported unless using beta 2048/2050 drivers which are very buggy.

EAX 1.0 gives preset Echo mixing on DS3D's 3D audio buffers only, no 2D audio mixing.
EAX 2.0 gives occlusion presets, and more reverb selections to use when building levels, still only works with 3D DS3D buffers.

EAX Wiki

Thanks for the quick response, that was very helpful.

I'll be on the lookout for a vortex2 card then. If only those werent so expensive...

Munx wrote:

Thanks for the quick response, that was very helpful.

I'll be on the lookout for a vortex2 card then. If only those werent so expensive...

Last time I looked there were a load of quite cheap (20-30GBP) for sale on ebay from Russia

My thoughts are A3D 1.x is pretty neat compared to early EAX / DS3D. 2.0 speaker output is boring with SBLive compared to 2.0 speaker output with Vortex 1 or the early Monster Sound cards with the Analog Devices DSP version of A3D.

SBLive also has noisy front output. Vortex 1 cards like Turtle Beach Montego have better signal quality, and a MIDI daughtercard header that works in DOS. Frankly I wouldn't even consider SBLive. Go for an Audigy 2 instead for your EAX needs.

ynari wrote:

Munx wrote:

Thanks for the quick response, that was very helpful.

I'll be on the lookout for a vortex2 card then. If only those werent so expensive...

Last time I looked there were a load of quite cheap (20-30GBP) for sale on ebay from Russia

The cheapest Russian ones Ive seen now go for $52+, which is out of my budget, at least for now. All the other ones Ive looked at are from US which means $35 shipping...
Also saw one in UK wih a winning bid of a couple pounds a week back, but the seller didnt want to ship abroad.

Might also want to consider a Sensaura-based card like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Supports A3D 1.0, EAX 1.0 and EAX 2.0. It "just works" and quite well IMO. Its MIDI also sounds awesome (better than the Live! IMO) which comes in handy if you're playing old General MIDI games in DOSBox/ScummVM. Here's a period review:
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/santacruzvoyetraturtlebeach/
Looks like they are about $30 shipped on ebay.

swaaye wrote:

SBLive also has noisy front output. Vortex 1 cards like Turtle Beach Montego have better signal quality, and a MIDI daughtercard header that works in DOS. Frankly I wouldn't even consider SBLive. Go for an Audigy 2 instead for your EAX needs.

As much as I love Aureal hardware, there are more pros than cons using a Live over the Vortex 1. EAX and A3D 2.0 were the API top guns and everything else wanted/had to be compatible to them.

For audio quality the Aureal cards are very clean, but if audio quality is a major concern then why choose between these two when there are far better alternatives?
I infer the most important is the gaming support from "gaming soundcards", everything else is secondary.
There are lots of A3D 1.0 games, and there are also an equal amount of EAX games. The Live supports HRTF for A3D 1.0 games, and also allows you to run EAX games as well.
The Vortex 1 has no reverb support, just really clean positional audio done in software (no hardware HRTF on Vortex 1's).
The drivers on the Live are more mature than the drivers Aureal put out. More games of a later time frame are supported that will work on a Live that a Vortex 1 will struggle with, e.g. Unreal 2 with EAX and 3D audio on a Live works fine, where as the Vortex 1 will not produce 3D audio or reverb due to the lack of support in the title.

For the time period (96') that the card was released, it was a great contender to every other soundcard. If their ADSP301 CoProcessor was ever released it would have brought reverb and extra audio channels to the card making it then much better than the later Live (in general).
The only reason one should every use one of those cards is if you couldn't get something better.

I would only keep those cards for reference and dev work, but would otherwise go straight for an Audigy 2 and/or a Vortex 2, since those should be the starting point of any recommended PCI gaming soundcards.

A card like the Santa Cruz tries to be the best of all worlds thanks to its Sensaura backbone, and it does a great job of it! Highly recommended card.

ZanQuance wrote:

As much as I love Aureal hardware, there are more pros than cons using a Live over the Vortex 1. EAX and A3D 2.0 were the API to […]
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As much as I love Aureal hardware, there are more pros than cons using a Live over the Vortex 1. EAX and A3D 2.0 were the API top guns and everything else wanted/had to be compatible to them.

For audio quality the Aureal cards are very clean, but if audio quality is a major concern then why choose between these two when there are far better alternatives?
I infer the most important is the gaming support from "gaming soundcards", everything else is secondary.
There are lots of A3D 1.0 games, and there are also an equal amount of EAX games. The Live supports HRTF for A3D 1.0 games, and also allows you to run EAX games as well.
The Vortex 1 has no reverb support, just really clean positional audio done in software (no hardware HRTF on Vortex 1's).
The drivers on the Live are more mature than the drivers Aureal put out. More games of a later time frame are supported that will work on a Live that a Vortex 1 will struggle with, e.g. Unreal 2 with EAX and 3D audio on a Live works fine, where as the Vortex 1 will not produce 3D audio or reverb due to the lack of support in the title.

For the time period (96') that the card was released, it was a great contender to every other soundcard. If their ADSP301 CoProcessor was ever released it would have brought reverb and extra audio channels to the card making it then much better than the later Live (in general).
The only reason one should every use one of those cards is if you couldn't get something better.

I would only keep those cards for reference and dev work, but would otherwise go straight for an Audigy 2 and/or a Vortex 2, since those should be the starting point of any recommended PCI gaming soundcards.

A card like the Santa Cruz tries to be the best of all worlds thanks to its Sensaura backbone, and it does a great job of it! Highly recommended card.

Yeah, practically, my recommendations would be to have an Audigy 1/2 and a Vortex 2. You get everything that way. The older options from both companies just reduce your featureset and quality.

I do like Sensaura and even QSound. The problem is those cards don't always work correctly with games. It's not a bad idea to look at driver release notes to see if they tweaked the driver for a specific game. I mean even with Creative cards, if you want EAX to work right with some old games, you must not use their WDM drivers.

BTW, apparently the Diamond Monster Sound M80 / MX200 are in fact hardware accelerated A3D 1.x cards. Unlike Vortex 1 or that Vortex Advantage too I suppose. Also, having used Vortex 1 quite a bit, unless you are planning to put it in a really slow PC (like maybe a Pentium 90), the CPU-based processing overhead isn't a concern.

Yeah the MX200 run the A3D code in the ADSP-2181 chip. The official AU8820 Vortex 1 design lacks an A3D cell for hardware HRTF but otherwise has:
32 WaveTable DMA channels feeding data into a 4k FIFO
16 General DMA channels feeding data into a 2k FIFO
From there the VDB is free to route the data to any appropriate blocks, such as Sample Rate Conversion and the Mixer, then out the CODEC or fed back into system memory via DMA.

Audio Hardware acceleration is any task which doesn't need to be done on the CPU. The 32 DMA channels are dedicated to feeding the WaveTable block, leaving only 16 channels to be shared with the Mixer and Sample Rate Converter. The WaveTable channels on the Vortex 1 cannot be routed and are instead mixed into 4 channels, 2 for FX host based mixing, and 2 for output. These 2 output channels don't need to be fed into the Sample Rate Converter as the WaveTable block has its own. So you reserve 2 mixer channels for the WT block leaving you with 30 mixer channels for other sounds. (note Mixer has 32 inputs mixed to 16 outputs)
The Vortex 2 greatly improved upon this routing idea and allows everything to be routed and connect to everything.

Whats important is the accuracy of anything done via software on the CPU. The AU8820 was Aureals way of cutting costs and improving a bit of audio design functionality, gaining many hardware pluses. The Sample Rate Converter and Mixer run in parallel on the AU8820 and aren't done linearly like the ADSP-2181, but HRTF is now ran on the CPU, though at 22kHz HRTF and only 7 audio sources there is really little overhead.
Not a bad design, but the successors of the Live! and AU8820 do the same job and much better. [edit]Thinking of it, the Live! functionally is essentially a copy of the MX200...

Sensaura issues are something we should all get to ironing out, I'm looking into it for a bit and it seems any instability and/or compatibility issues stem from the Audio3d.dll versions used. Making a copy of this dll then renaming it to A3D.dll allows some games to detect A3D, where as the 3.12 dlls will fail. But games like Half-Life only enable A3D properly with the official A3D.dll.
Their may be a general DLL mix and match that works for broadest compatibility. You can also run the updated 4193 WDM drivers under Win98 for the 2008 updated versions of the Sensaura DLLs.