I'd like to add to the Creative hate. They used to make decent products about ten years ago, now the only functional part of the company is their advertising department. If you already have a Creative card, you might be interested in the alternative .

I pulled all my creative cards out of my computers. I have an Audigy platinum sitting on my desk, collecting dust. But I did try those, actually, and they were certainly significantly less bloaty.

Thanks for the rec's guys Me's will search on my lunch break for the brands.

My advice is, think what you want to connect to it, if its just 2 speakers then theres no difference, but if you have a set of speakers that should have somekind of teamwork (ie surround sound) then make sure the card supports that.

For instance, my built in soundcard has two lines in, front and rear speakers so what this means that my JBL surround system is kinda useless since i can only use either front OR the rear plug in.

I'm using a 5 satalite + sub woofer set up, one day I'll upgrade that too!

well, the pc I built recently (my home theatre one) support 5.1 sound with the onboard sound card. In fact, it's my damned stereo that's limiting my sound quality from that thing, since it only accepts stereo inputs. I need to upgrade that bastard.

I know crap all about sound cards, but I do know that nearly all my friends who game and know their hardware prefer the mobo onboard audio to spending heaps on cards. They also tell me that, given how powerful (gaming) pc's tend to be these days, the burden you take off your system with an external card is negligible at best.

Well nice story that about Creative. If it is true it will spare me come extra money for a sound card that has a name. Yet there is an other problem. I am composer and although I know for VST and stuff I find SoundFonts most fitting to my needs. So if I want a new sound card, I am after something that supports SoundFonts. And hardware level support (I didn't find any free SF2 emulator yet - but would be curious) for them as well as for various operations over sound (reverb, flanger, phasers, chorus etc.) will be nice thing. Yay, that all I have in my Creative SB Live (have it since 2000).

Now is the question: if something give me all that and it isn't Creative, what is it?

As for kX drivers - I used them for three years, for the time I paused with composing. But since I started again, I faced issue EXACTLY with SoundFont reproduction, which is in kX solved in a pretty clumsy way - boohoo to kX. At the other side, I realized that with careful done settings I can achieve more less everything I need with the last version of Creative SB Live drivers - which I fund scalable well enough. I am a living example of someone who does not need kX at all, but uses sound card's abilities probably more than most of users.