Sound Cards

[Udidtoo]

If anyone has any experience with sound cards NOT made be Creative I would be interested in opinions.

For over a year I had heard about the Snap,Crackle and Pop problem lots of folk were having with Audigy based cards, mostly X-FI but not limited to, but never had any trouble of my own, Recently my daughters bought me a new rig and it has a Asus MB with the Nvidia 4 chipsets which if you followed the process at Creative labs forums was the most common denominator for the problem, along with high end vid cards being another commonality.

This is the 1st PC I've had that I didn't put together in about 5 years and over all its a steady gaming platform although its built to be a media type rig. Loving the AMD and even though they didn't know what they were doing they walked out of the store with an 1900XTX for me to pop in, along with the old Audigy 2 ZS which had dwelt in 2 previous rigs, quite happily too.

Now anything that has bass, even small amounts ends with a electronic crackle. Firing 8 .50's or a pair of Hispanos sounds like....mmmm what's the rules here? poop? After 9 months of slowly acknowledging there was a problem for a significant number of people Creative finally announced that they had determined that it was all the fault of the Nvidia based boards and all of their thrilled to death customers should take it up with the manufacturers using them. Case closed. You can't even start a thread now about the issue because as soon as a mod see's it its locked. Talk about winning hearts and minds. Lack of serious competition usually isn't good for the consumer.

Anyway. I am just hoping someone has had positive experience with anything else Turtle Beach, you name it. Just tell me straight pro's and con's. For now Realtec onboard is sufficing for music and even some newer games. The digi music is actually quite good but IL-2 playing with onboard just blows. I can make better airplane noises running around the back yard with my arms outstretched. Add to that I can't get TS to work with the onboard and it comes down to time to jump ship from Creative but there aren't to many other place to land. A new card would be cheaper at this time than a change of MB, which is really out of the question.

Ok, angry, frustrated anti-CL vent over. Now someone please tell me happy stories about great sounding cards that only cost 30 rupees.