First post, by dusthillguy
Hello,
Just last month I had to get a new computer after not upgrading for about 11 years. My new computer has no PCI slots, only PCIe, so I couldn't re-use my old Soundblaster Live that I had been using all that time. So I've been researching what soundcards are available for PCIe.
On ebay right now, there are two different kinds of PCIe sound card that seem to be common at the moment. The cheaper and more common one has the CMI8738 chipset. I bought one of those and it's pretty good, it features the OPL3 synth. There have been some threads on this forum about it.
The second and more expensive one is the 'Sound Blessed'. It's being sold by various ebay sellers for between £17 and £25 or so. In the ebay photos it has a black heatsink on one of the chips and appears to have "Sound Blessed" printed/embossed on the corner of the card, though in a lot of the ebay listings, the 'sound blessed' logo has been obscured with a blur filter.
I got curious about what exactly it would be like, and I decided to get one for christmas.
Surprisingly it seems to be a Sound Blaster Live! adapted for PCIe with a Texas Instruments PCI-PCIe bridge.
The model I got looks a bit different from the ones in the ebay pictures, it has some extra audio connectors on the back panel and the logo in the corner says "Sound Cidblues" instead of "Sound Blessed", although the cardboard box it came in still has "Sound Blessed" printed on it.
I've been using it in my main desktop system with Linux and it seems to work really well, the hardware MIDI synth feature works properly and the sound output quality seems good.
Here are some photos of it: http://dusthillguy.ddns.net/folder/soundblessedcidblues/
Has anyone else got one of these?