New Sound Card

[DaveB]

Yes Jonesey.. and how many of us here understood all that The difference between Digital and Analogue sound is immediately noticeable but once more, you need the setup to handle it ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

[emfrat]

Well, for BigBeast (aka The Flying Machine) I only bought a 2.1 speaker set. As I sit at my CH yoke, pedals and quadrant in front of the screen, the speakers are all about 1' behind the screen with the left and right ones being nearly 3' either side. Sitting in Eric Dantes' Twin Bonanza at EGGD, I can hear WoAI ATRs starting up behind me, then taxying round my starboard side before crossing my bows as they head down to Rwy 27, with a nice Doppler effect, too. Then I start up, and with the Tuinstra sound files I get a lovely open-pipe bark, just like a speedway bike with a big J.A.P engine, first from the right and then from the left. Starting a Connie or Lancaster is even better - the sound moves around, 3-4-2-1 just as it should :tab:
That'll do me - BigBeast can feed a 7.1 setup, but why bother?

MikeW

[Quixoticish]

If you're getting more fps with the slider set to "basic" then that simply highlights a poor soundcard. What you're actually doing is disabling any hardware acceleration and switching it to software acceleration, causing it to use more CPU cycles to pump sound through your speakers. If this is indeed quicker then having hardware acceleration turned on where your sound card does all of the work then its demonstrating that your sound card isn't up to the job. Sadly most audigys seem to fall prey to this, and although Creative Labs appear to be the market leaders in third party sound cards they are notorious resource hogs and I don't know one person who's had a kind word to say about them.

[Nigel H-J]

I appreciate what you are saying Chris and not being a techy when it comes to understanding computer hardware in fact, you could say I get quite easily lost understanding all the working parameters of a CPU, Sound Cards etc. However, my old sound card was well on borrowed time and unfortunately the Creative Audigy I bought was all I could afford at the time and knew it would be a step down from my previous one but, at the end of the day, it works and given that my frames rates have improved, I am a happy bunny (for the time being that is).

I did not want to risk going for another make as I know very little about other sound cards and to play safe, decided to stick with what little I knew!!

One day I will get a better one but for the moment this will have to do!!

Regards
Nigel.

[Quixoticish]

At the end of the day it makes little difference Nigel, what works for you works for you and if you're happy with what you're getting with the settings you're running, and you've had a performance increase to boot thanks to the upgrade then there's no sense in tinkering with it any further. ;-)