I used them for a short time to make my SBLive 5.1 (model SB0100) work on Windows 7 x64, for testing purposes. They worked great and I was even able to use the optical in on the Livedrive front panel for recording.

I have since moved that SBLive card to a Win98 machine so it now uses Creative's drivers. Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with kx drivers, but from what I understand, they don't do EAX which makes them less desirable in a retro build.

Hi @peate.
I have been using kX for years, doing all kinds of stuff with the sound 😀 Even wrote two custom plugins for my needs (attached below).

d274.da simply delays a stereo signal by 274 samples (you can edit the code and put your own number); it helps, for example, to compensate an existing delay between front and rear speakers, without wasting DSP resources with standard plugins like TheSmallDelay or TheDelay which consume large fixed amounts iTram/xTram.

Rear+.da is a stereo upmixing plugin that generates Rear L/R signal from Front L/R. It is more resource-efficient compared to plugins included in the installer. Upmixing algorithm is based on Surrounder+.

@Joseph_Joestar
"they don't do EAX which makes them less desirable in a retro build"

This can be solved by adding another card for use with Creative drivers. If you connect two cards in a chain (card 1 -> card 2 -> speakers), you get the power of both Creative and kX DSP. Just for reference, here are how different cards can be "coupled":
- Live! and Audigy 1 series have 5.1 SPDIF outputs and inputs on internal pins, which allows to pass 6 channels of digital audio from one card to another;
- Audigy 2/2ZS/4Pro have 6 outputs but only 4 inputs;
- Audigy 2Value/4/RX have stereo SPDIF output but no digital input;
- X-Fi only have stereo SPDIF I/O;
- E-MU cards have stereo SPDIF and 8-channel ADAT I/O, but inputs are not usable under kX driver (there are clicks due to card not synchronizing to input, and clock selection is not implemented in kX).
Also, E-MU and Creative drivers are not compatible within one OS (you can use E-MU + kX, or Creative + kX, but not Creative + E-MU).

Hope this helps.

P.S. Alternatively, one can keep a single card and switch between kX and Creative drivers at any time via a batch script and reboot.
Possibilities are truly endless as you can see 😀

Thanks @Wanderer, I was looking for the "like" button but I guess there isn't one. I like trying out new plug-ins.

I know kX is not suited for gamers, too bad, cause it does everything else so well. I'm not into games though, only music. I don't use digital/SPDIF so those imputs don't matter to me. I just want enough resources for heavy DSP's which the Live had trouble with due to limited memory i-tram or something like that.

I gave up on even trying a PCI to PCI-E riser now that I have the RX on the way. I figured out the pin assignment on the AUD_EXT connector. Now I have to see if I can figure out a way to connect it.

If you need analog output, RX is indeed a better choice over Live!+PCIe adapter.

For use with headphones I can recommend xfeed3 plugin at default settings, found in the "da" folder here: https://github.com/kxproject/kx-audio-driver
It does the Crossfeed just right, i.e. alleviates extreme L/R panning while not changing the overall character of the sound.

HTH