It shouldn't slow down your games at all, can't see any reason why it
would. And the sound quality's ok; obviously I don't know what your
current soundcard is, but it's a vast improvement on my motherboard's
onboard sound.
In fact, the SB Live should be great for recent games, although it's
a bit patchier for running old games in DOS mode as the SB16
emulation is in software and can only be loaded if you use a
protected mode memory manager (eg EMM386), which a few games and a
lot of oldschool demos (I don't mean playable demos of games; if you
don't know any other meaning of "demo" then you probably don't need
to worry about this :) won't run with.
HOWEVER, for midi stuff and music, I'm not sure I can recommend it
wholeheartedly, because the SB Live doesn't have official ASIO
drivers. If you're semi-serious about the music side of things and
you want to get inputs into the computer (whether MIDI inputs or
line/microphone inputs) and do realtime stuff with them, you should
consider getting an ASIO card, as without ASIO you'll have around a
half-second lag between playing the keyboard/guitar/whatever and the
computer doing anything with it, which pretty much makes it unusable
for live realtime stuff. With ASIO, you can get that latency down low
enough for it to be almost unnoticeable.
(There are some unofficial SB Live ASIO drivers for Win9x, but I
won't recommend them because they trashed my Windows installation and
then they didn't work too well once I'd reinstalled, either. Oh, and
they were a pain to uninstall and replace with the original drivers
again. And they don't work on Windows 2000 or XP.)
So, for games, the SB Live is great. For messing around with music
but not doing any realtime stuff with inputs, it's ok. But if you
think you want ASIO you should consider the new SB Audigy (which has
ASIO in all its flavours, even the cheap Player one without the
external digital I/O box thing) or a dedicated music soundcard like
the Audiophile, which can also cope with real 96kHz 24-bit stereo
recording (I don't think my ears could tell the difference, but maybe
yours are better...).
For the record, I have an SB Live, I use it for occasional
gameplaying, lots of listening to mp3s, and a bit of music making
using Jeskola Buzz and various other packages, I've had no real
problems with it (not working with some old DOS demos is a minor
annoyance, but then a lot of them expect GUSes anyway, so no real
issue), I'm fairly happy with it. I am kind of annoyed at the lack of
ASIO, but if I do upgrade I'll wait for Audigies to get cheaper first
(they're very new, so still expensive), and I'm not sure I'd use it
enough to justify upgrading anyway. If anyone here does a lot of midi
stuff (I don't, really), then tell them what exactly you want to do
and they'd be more helpful than I am for knowing how much you'd want
ASIO.
(I tried not to be longwinded, but I failed. Sorry.)
― Rebecca, Tuesday, 6 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)
Well, if you don't want ASIO then the Live should be marvy, I'd say,
though I'm not an expert, and you can probably get them cheap second-
hand now the Audigy's out and people will be upgrading. (You don't
need ASIO for all midi stuff, but if you want to do lag-free live
stuff using software as a midi sound module I think you do, but I
don't really know much about midi...)
― Rebecca, Tuesday, 6 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)
Hmm, while there's a geeky soundcard thread around, any UK posters
have a Gravis Ultrasound they want to part with really cheap? I
figure "really cheap" isn't too much to ask considering how old they
are. But then I thought 386DX/486 laptops would be really cheap, and
they, uh, are only slightly cheap. But I've stopped having any use
for one of those anyway. (Actually I have no real use for a GUS, but
hey.)
― Rebecca, Tuesday, 6 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)
ASIO doesn't handle midi, only audio communications between SEquencers,
soft synths and the like and the sound card. You can still do this using directX
but as rebecca says, with increased audio latency. Midi latency dempend on
the x (i've forgotten th name) driver, but should be pretty good on any modern
sound card/interface. however if you are going to be playing a soft synth then
the combined midi and audio latencies (without an ASIO driver for the audio)
may be too much.
― Ed, Wednesday, 7 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)
two years pass...