i read the following on the internet, any truth to this?
Warning
Although the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! line of PCI sound adapters are immensely popular, we cannot recommend them. We have many reports of poor audio quality, compatibility problems, and system crashes attributable to a Sound Blaster Live! sound adapter. We have experienced these problems ourselves on Windows 9X and Windows 2000 systems, despite loading the latest drivers and doing everything else we could think of to resolve them, including fiddling with PCI latency. These problems are documented on public messageboards, the USENET comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard.* and microsoft.public.win2000.* newsgroups, and elsewhere. Note that although these problems are most common with the Live! boards, they also occur with earlier boards such as the AWE32.
The usual symptoms are crackling sound, dropouts, DMA problems, bluescreens, and sporadic system crashes, including blackscreen crashes to a hard reboot. The problems seem most common on motherboards that use VIA KT-133 family chipsets, but we have seen similar problems on motherboards that use non-VIA chipsets, including the remarkably stable Intel i440BX and 815 chipsets. Although the problems don't show up on every system and are sometimes not reproducible, they are common enough that we consider them systemic. Problems seem most likely to occur on overclocked systems, systems with ACPI enabled, and systems that have a high-performance video card, although we have seen the problem occur on vanilla Intel 440BX and 815-based systems that were not overclocked, did not use ACPI, and used only embedded video.
The only solution we know of is to remove the Sound Blaster Live! card, go in with fire and sword to eradicate all Creative Labs drivers, and install a different sound adapter. Unfortunately, the Creative Labs drivers are very persistent, and a simple uninstall leaves drivers and registry entries that may cause continued problems. Doing a repair or upgrade installation of the operating system isn't enough. The only sure way we know to solve the problem is to back up your data, fdisk your hard drive, and reinstall the operating system and all applications from scratch.
so, what do you all think? i have a 4 speaker setup that used to work fine under me, i recently upgraded my computer and switched to win2k pro in the process. now the rear speakers dont output, and whenever i try to get into the creative software - the mixer or diagnostics, etc, the app locks up. also, the post got me to thinking, i have had intermittent lockups while playing games - war3, morrowind for example, where the system freezes and repeats the last bit of sound over and over again. not sure if this is sound card related or not - what do you all think? was considering upgrading to a nice turtle beach card, ive heard good things about them.
edit: sorry guys, just realized how long that post was. thanks for taking the time to read it.
