Drat, I should have added the following -

I'm very interested in add-ons such as daughter boards. Perhaps any recommendations for those two sound cards that I wish to acquire could have DB connectors on them, although this isn't essential I suppose.

Thank you.

How about an Audigy? They are win9x compatible and have excellent sound quality, much better than the Live!.

I had some Audio-PCI based SB 128 cards. I remember them refusing to play the audio streams of two programs at the same time. Also I had some small isssues with directsound games and playing MP3's. The MP3 issue had a fix though. These cards have no daughterboard header.

For your requirements the Vortex-2 cards are a good allround choice. They are the best card for A3D game environmental sound. A3D is told to soudn very good, but it was only supported by a few games. Vortex-2 cards usually come with a daughterboard header.

Emu10k1 based cards like the SB-Live! and Audigy-1 are not a bad choice either. They are the best cards for EAX game environmental sound, which is much more common than A3D. They have no daughterboard header. I read some complains about 48KHz resampling artifacts, and about system incompatibility, but both issues are debatable. I for one don't notice them.

The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard was highly rated at the time (chipset CS4630). It has a daughterboard header. It does both A3D 1.0 and EAX 2.0. But it has it's own implementation on the resulting environmental sound.

I do not know much about any later cards, as they are more windows NT/XP aimed anyways.

I do not know much about any later cards, as they are more windows NT/XP aimed anyways.

I guess anything above an Audigy requires XP or Vista.

Thanks very much for all replies - much appreciated.

Vortex 1/2 cards also have a DOS driver that doesn't need EMM386. It supports only up to SBPro, which is somewhat of a bummer, but they sound better than a real SB16 because the onboard circuitry is much higher quality. This is something I've experienced first-hand.

I really like Vortex cards for 9x machines that also want some decent DOS capabilities.