Creative X-Fi announced!

[Nowhere]

Powerful rose-colored nostalgia goggles in effect in here. Have any of you actually used a Vortex-2 based card recently? Did you really enjoy the horrible frequency butchering DACs, bad drivers limited to Win98, and the awesome power of 11KHz audio in a sort of "blurry" 3d space?

Well I loaded up HL2 to experience the power of A3D 2.0 back in October on a Diamond Monster Sound MX300, before HL2 was released. I would NEVER trade my Audigy 2 ZS for anything A3D. EAX 3 & 4, along with improvements to the overall spatialization and DAC quality have totally, completely outclassed those old cards.

BTW, a SBLive! sounds better than most Aureal Vortex 2 cards. Those Aureal based cards had horrible analog signal quality.

I have still Aureal Vortex SQ2500 in my main PC...sure, there are beter cards DAC-wise, but mine's definetely better than Live (perhaps because it was the "reference" one, made by Aureal), and on my crappy audio equipment I probably don't need much more. Definetely it's price can't be beaten (I got mine very cheaply, when everyone forgot about Aureal...). And...3dspace is definetely the best you can get (at least on headphones, the way I play); also, Windows XP has very good drivers for Aureal (they also work in 2k3)

[Kurt]

I didn't know xp had drivers for aureal....maybe it's time I looked on ebay for an sq2500

[xortam]

Aureal XP drivers

Makes me consider moving my MX-300 into my HTPC box (though that means more HW in there).

[Nowhere]

Just remember to follow instructions from this site (here and here from the quick look)

Just one word from me just in case: DO NOT update the souncard driver on windows update (the one on XP cd has all features and a3d, the one om wu are just generic stereo, and hard to remove)