Advice running Onboard and Audiophile.

[Sweetloaf]

I'm getting sick of the Midi latency on my Audigy Platinum ZS so I'm looking into getting a decent ASIO 2 compatible card. My problem is that the cards I'm looking into don't support surround sound and my budget is limited to £60ish.

I'm tempted by:

M audio Audiophile or EMU 0404 (any advice here appreciated)

Because of this I'm wondering what issues I'm likely to face by running onboard and one of the cards mention above. My onboard audio is actually

Creative sound Blaster Live 24-bit onboard audio
- 24-bit / 96KHz audio quality
- Up to 7.1 CH Surround Sound, Dolby Digital ready

So I'm happy to use that for gaming. I don't mind simply disabling one in the control panel the re/dis abling via BIOS if needed and rebooting everytime I want to swap but I don't want to re-install drivers etc everytime I want to record some music.

Does anyone do anything similar or is it unwise?

I can't believe that my old Atari ST coped with Midi better than my Audigy 2

 

[Codmate]

It's only worth swapping between the two if you game in surround.

If you're just after a MIDI interface - why not grab one of M-Audio's USB interfaces?

If you are after the better quality sound too, then the Audiophile would be good.
You should just install it and see what happens. If needs be you can manage devices via 'device manager' (unsuprisingly) - just right click on 'my computer' and click 'manage'. Now go to device manager - find the soundcard you want to turn off and disable it.

You can now save this config as a 'Hardware Profile' - just right click on 'my computer' and click 'properties'.

 

[Sweetloaf]

Thanks, I new it was technically possible, just hoped it would cause any major problems

Any advice on which card? Not keen on the whole USB interface thing really.

 

[Magsy]

Lol, don't do it the hard way

Try sounds and multimedia control panel, you can choose which card is used for playback or recording there, on the fly.

If you use a player supporting asio you can leave windows and games to the on board, then use asio in the players for the good card - no switching needed.

The 0404 and live maybe have some driver issues but they will work afaik (the Audigy does)

 

[Sweetloaf]

Cheers