The Mystery Of The AC97 Sound...

[Waccoon]

AC97 Audio is pretty good by itself.  The Live! and Audigy cards have an edge because of various hardware acceleration techniques.  I thought I read once that most on-board audio chips can use between 5-15% CPU utilization, while the Live! card uses about 2-3%.  Of course, that was a few years ago.  I still prefer a dedicated sound card, especially since the Audigy's digital to analog converter is pretty amazing, and the Creative cards have a software controlled equalizer.  The built-in audio on my VIA266a motherboard is weak and tinny, my nForce2 board is too muddy.

I guess mobo manufacturers assume that if you care THAT much about audio quality, you'll just buy a dedicated card, anyway.

Too bad Win2000 wrecks it all.  Even with the latest Creative drivers I can't get rid of cracking and popping with either my VIAKT266a or nForce2 machines.  However, some games are better than others.  NASCAR Racing 4 really tortures the Augigy card and sounds pretty awful, while Unreal Tournament works like a charm.

It would be very nice indeed to hear an Audigy card on an Amiga.

[Waccoon]

And they said it was VIA's fault

The problem is with the Win32 kernel, and how it uses interrupts, as far as I know.  Win32 doesn't allow any task to completely interrupt the system (supposedly), so sound latency problems arise.  As for Linux, I have no idea, but I'm sure the PC's horrible IRQ sharing hack has something to do with it.

That's why I want to hear a Live! or Audigy card on an Amiga.  I'd be interesting to see how differently a PPC based machine handles sound latency issues.

IMO, sound has always been the PC's major fault.  That explains why I spent most of my time sampling and creating music on my A1200.  Audition 4 for the Amiga is still one of the few sound editors out there that does realtime mixing (on the PC, the few sound editors that support previews simply mix clips a few seconds long.  Pssh).