Maybe I spoke too soon about the sound output quality being good. After a day of using it, when it got really quiet in my house, I noticed that there's a constant hissing noise coming from the audio jack. It's very faint and I can only hear it when the room is totally silent, but it's there. The headphones I use are fairly sensitive which might be part of why it's noticeable.

I've solved the problem by using an audio extension cable with a built-in volume wheel, and turning the volume wheel down a bit, and then adjusting the sound card audio mixer up a bit to compensate. oh god oh hell yea man

I ordered one of the Sound Blessed cards a few months ago because I thought it was hilarious. Still haven't installed it in a system.

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

Use PCItoPCI-E adapter.

What's the benefit here, EAX support over PCIe? I never really used EAX. It would be interesting to me if the dos emulation worked, but I can't imagine it does.

BinaryDemon wrote on 2019-12-28, 06:17:

What's the benefit here, EAX support over PCIe? I never really used EAX. It would be interesting to me if the dos emulation worked, but I can't imagine it does.

No, you have X-fi for EAX in PCIe.

It is just a silly Chinese card.

For retro machines, I guess it would be useful for a Win9x machine as there are no X-fi drivers for Win9x. That is if you could make the SB-Live Win9x drivers work with the Sound Blessed card.

DOS support would definitely be out of the question.

BinaryDemon wrote on 2019-12-28, 06:17:

What's the benefit here, EAX support over PCIe? I never really used EAX. It would be interesting to me if the dos emulation worked, but I can't imagine it does.

For me, the main benefit is the emu10k1 wavetable synth. I wrote a lot of MIDI music for it over the past 14 or so years. Thanks to this chinese PCIe card, I can keep using it in my new computer.
Of course I could just use fluidsynth, but it sounds subtly different.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2019-12-28, 04:07:

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

Use PCItoPCI-E adapter.

I considered that, but that comes with its own set of problems related to physically fitting the adapter + card. It's a bit awkward to manage.

Sorry to keep bumping these threads, but I'm really curious about how this card even came to exist. How did the chinese manufacturers get hold of the chips? I'd be very interested in knowing the story behind all this.
Also if anyone has any thoughts or opinions about this card or even just about weird chinese knockoff soundcards in general, I'd be curious to know

Apologies for thread necro but can anyone confirm if these work in Win 98, 95 and DOS? I can see other benefits for me in that SB Live with EMU10K chip usually works well in AROS also and can be persuaded to work in MacOS somewhat so this could be a card for ALL OS I might need to play with.

for 9X native dos box it might? work for dos games running under windows. Thats if it has a EMU10K1 like a real sblive. If it doesn't have a EMU10K1 it might not work at all. For plain DOS I think it wont work at all becasue the PCI-E only motherboard doesn't have DDMA, and not PCI bus. creatives DOS drivers I'm pretty sure won't work right. I don't own one but thats my speculation.

Creative still sells and supports a PCIe card that is based on the EMU10K chip. Depending on the market it's called the SoundBlaster Audigy 5 or Audigy Rx.

Note: Creative also sells a SoundBlaster Audigy Fx which is a simple HDA based sound card. It's no better than onboard audio solutions.