Onboad Sound vs. PCI Sound Cards

Heylo everyone. I got a Soundblaster Live a few months ago and plugged it in to my mobo. Worked fine, up untill I started listening to it more closely. I noticed the background noise, or fuzz or what have you, was two or three times as great than with my onboard sound. I also noticed that the clicking sounds you get when sounds are switching rapidly were magnifyed, such as in video games. Is this suposed to happen? Thats one of the reasons I got a sound card to begin with! I e-mailed Creative but they were no help, so I just decided to be lazy and take the thing back out and go back to onboard. Would I be better off in the future getting a motherboard with a nice onboard soundcard, or would soemthing like an Audigy 2 not give me this problem?

 

did u try putting it in a different slot? and did u get the newest drivers for it? did you try fixing it at all? id say try putting it in a different slot and make sure u got the newest drivers, and make sure your speakers are plugged in all the way, worth a try right?

 

Well ya, of course I tryed to fix it =P I tryed it in at least three different PCI slots and I tryed upgrading the drivers. I tryed all the drivers from Creative that possibly could work and they all said they could not find the sound card. Its an OEM Sound Blaster by the way.

 

i made a big rant about soundblaster cards somewhere... but i can't seem to find it... oh well, i'll type it again with you in mind:

all soundblaster cards will have the clipping and hissing sound, whether it'd be the sblive! value or the Audigy 2 ZS platinum. It's due to the fact that the DAC's don't support 44.1KHz sample rates (although they support 48KHz and multiples thereof). So what they do is put a resampler chip on the card to resample the music/game sounds from 44.1KHz to 48KHz. The chips, though, utilize a very poor algorithm for resampling (which explains the hissing and the clipping especially) and has a low-pass filter of around 15KHz (so if your speakers/headphones support 15khz and up, you won't hear it). There's no way you can fix it, since it's soldered onto the sound card. If you're really annoyed by it like i was, your best bet and pretty much the only option is to get a new soundcard.