soundstorm here soundstorm there ... very objective article LOL :rolleyes: not worth reading

I agree. They reviewed SoundStorm, SB Live Value, SB Audigy, Terratec and "a cheap Cmedia 8738 PCI sound card" What a crock. Where's the Via Envy's? Where's the M-Audio? I thought TweakTown was a decent site, but this turns it into the Inquirer.

If soundstorm is so good ... why is nF2 the only chipset owning this soundfeature ? not to mention ... the latest creative model does only cost 70€ - and buying a Soundcard is not like buying a CPU - it remains much longer in your Computer ... and focusing on Soundstorm e.g. forces you to look for mobo that has Soundstorm, too when you want to get something new also the EAX engine is just plain awesome ... when you got some 50€ 2.1 speakers you won't hear the difference between any of the cards for sure ... but when you make full use of EAX3 or even 4 you will start to hear the difference e.g. UT2004 ... you here a sound and you exactly know where it is how far it is and what it is and the A2 does have a DD decoder integrated ... I always watch my DVD movies - audio rendered by audigy - which sounds better then any software DVD player the SS is indeed a good soundchip but still you can't compare it to a real soundcard ... and to make the a DD decoder the only argument to by it is very simple ... next we mention the beauty of the chip ?

The article is idiotic, not suprising considering the author. Just because nForce encodes to Dolby Digital does NOT make it sound good. What makes it sound good is the DAC of the decoder, which any other Soundcard would use were it to output digitally as well. The other big problem here is he knows nothing about 3D Audio. The Dolby Digital encoding has NOTHING to do with 3D Audio. If he used the nForce's analog output he'd have gotten the exact same positioning as were he to use Dolby Digital encoding. I'm not going to waste more time on the stupidity of the content. Don't read it.

nope ... I personally hate any DVD application sicne there is no one that really does fit all needs ... but since you have to use one of them I go for PowerDVD ... this one at least playes all types of media ... while such BS like winDVD was not even able to play my LOTR3 DVD without glitches and when I was watching terminator 3 I was quite disappointed by the sound due the low Subwoofer usage ... had to turn it up quite much .... the I watched Matrix 3 on DVD and was quite disappointed with the sound, too it was not really clear and kinda .... just not what I expected so I went trough the options many times ... searched for other DVD players and so on till I finally tried the SPDIF option which sends the signals directly to the audigy and if you have analog speakers selected the Audigy will do the work then. and WOW the sound was as I like it ... clear ... powerfull ... and the overall positioning was just better .... OK its not a difference like day and night but it was better ... hell I watched the dock war in Matrix 3 nearly 20 times and I am SURE it sounds better

Err, no. Dolby Digital Encoding with the nForce encodes whatever the source audio is into that format. How can you get HIGHER quality audio from a game (for example) by encoding it's audio (Which probably already uses a lossy format like MP3) into another lossy audio format in realtime. Answer? You can't - in the same way compressing a bitmap to a jpeg/gif will not give you the exact same quality as a bitmap. The DAC of the decoder IS relevent. Better quality DACs = Better sound. nForce has in general poor DACs, therefore it's anlog sound quality sounds poor. The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz similarly has 16-Bit/48kHz DACs which are HIGH quality & produce BETTER sound for analog output. Like I said, all sound is analog. All sound has to go through a DAC at some point. Dolby Digital encoding has NOTHING to do with sound quality improvements. As regards Doom 3 audio. Carmack likes portability. DirectSound 3D would mean it would be limited to Windows. That & doing it with a custom audio engine means the positioning can be the same with all soundcards.

Actually the Audigy 1 supports AHD already, while EAX 4 isnt really used by many games. And btw, EAX4 is unofficially supported by Audigy 1s. The AHD feature is rarely seen (heard) in any games even though it is an awesome advancement in sound technology for games. I believe you never heard the AHD demo from creative since your last creative card was a Live!. I suggest you actually listen to the full features of EAX before bashing it. Comparing your SBLive! with others is just plain stupid. Until now I only owned creative cards except 1 orchid and 1 audio blaster in the mid 90s and never experienced problems except the dreaded KT266(A) crackling bug, which was caused by the VIA chipset itself anyway. I dont know what you are talking about. The only thing I would like to see from creative cards is less CPU utilization. But that might happen soon with PCI-E cards. Much more I would like to see full support of EAX 3+ features by game developers. AHD is about 3 years old now (correct me if I am wrong) and still there are only a handful of games which support it. that is ridiculous! when I found out doom3 wasnt going to support it I was pretty mad.

"A. If you're using Digital Speakers the DAC isn't important." WRONG. A DAC is still used. In this case not the Soundcards DAC, but the decoders DAC. "B. About 90% of PC audio is digital to begin with." All audio stored on a PC is inherently in a digital format. It still has to be converted to analog to be played. "Think of Dolby Digital Encoding like Direct 3D or OpenGL. Software rendering produces lower quality results because to improve performance there are some shortcuts that are being made. Since SoundStorm does it all in Hardware there are no shortcuts and the quality is better. " Again, wrong. the DICE merely compresses the multi-channel audio stream into Dolby Digital. It *cannot* improve sound quality as it is only compressing it into another format.

Man you really start to annoy all ppl. here I KNOW WHAT I DO .... and I do know that I do not have digital speakers and I do know that the Audigy does the job ... and now I take the ***** audigy box and there is a big fat Dolby EX logo and then I turn it round and there is a ***** text telling me the card got an integrated dolby decoder ... man DID YOU ***** GET IT NOW ?