05-14-2013, 03:19 PM
Hey Variable, thanks. Yeah, been MIA for a while but had a lot to be getting on with lately and struggling to find time to game much at the moment. Hopefully things will calm down a bit soon and I'll be back
Certainly for the soundcard I'd recommend the Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatality Pro http://www.amazon.com/Creative-SB0886-Ti...tality+pro This has the shielding over the board to protect it from interference but I'm only going by what I've read that this is important and you could take a chance on the cheaper standard X-Fi Titanium or even the Xtreme Gamer if you can still find it anywhere. Alternatives to Creative if you decide CMSS-3D isn't important are the Asus Xonar DX/DG/DGX http://uk.asus.com/Multimedia/Audio_Cards/Xonar_DGX/ which might have less features/connections than but apparently use higher quality components and thus have a cleaner sound (and perhaps the drivers are less problematic than Creative's but daniel k's pack apparently eliminated a lot of those problems http://forums.creative.com/showthread.php?t=698937 )
As mentioned in the Wiki I quoted from to Misha, the best positional audio with CMSS-3D apparently comes with games that use Direct3D or OpenAL and it seems there's been a move away from that to software processing, which gives far worse positional audio. So if the games you play don't support either of those APIs, you probably won't be very impressed with CMSS-3D. Some reports suggest THX ProStudio Pro is clearer than CMSS-3D although the virtual surround is not as good as CMSS-3D with Direct3D or OpenAL but may be just as good with games that use software processing. I recommend you have a listen to some youtube videos demonstrating CMSS-3D and THX such as this
Certainly for the soundcard I'd recommend the Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatality Pro http://www.amazon.com/Creative-SB0886-Ti...tality+pro This has the shielding over the board to protect it from interference but I'm only going by what I've read that this is important and you could take a chance on the cheaper standard X-Fi Titanium or even the Xtreme Gamer if you can still find it anywhere. Alternatives to Creative if you decide CMSS-3D isn't important are the Asus Xonar DX/DG/DGX http://uk.asus.com/Multimedia/Audio_Cards/Xonar_DGX/ which might have less features/connections than but apparently use higher quality components and thus have a cleaner sound (and perhaps the drivers are less problematic than Creative's but daniel k's pack apparently eliminated a lot of those problems http://forums.creative.com/showthread.php?t=698937 )
As mentioned in the Wiki I quoted from to Misha, the best positional audio with CMSS-3D apparently comes with games that use Direct3D or OpenAL and it seems there's been a move away from that to software processing, which gives far worse positional audio. So if the games you play don't support either of those APIs, you probably won't be very impressed with CMSS-3D. Some reports suggest THX ProStudio Pro is clearer than CMSS-3D although the virtual surround is not as good as CMSS-3D with Direct3D or OpenAL but may be just as good with games that use software processing. I recommend you have a listen to some youtube videos demonstrating CMSS-3D and THX such as this