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PREFACE:
The sound card provides
the audio interface to your computer through speakers and a
microphone. I strongly recommend in the purchase of a
CREATIVE©
built Sound Blaster® card, not a compatible. The only cards
available today are Plug and Play (PnP) so installation is a snap, that is, until
PnP doesn't work.
If your motherboard is PnP and it doesn't recognize the PnP sound
card, Creative technical support will basically tell you to buy a better
motherboard. They may be right, I'm not sure, but if you do have
PnP problems, you can try disabling PnP in the BIOS, and after manually setting
the Interrupt Requests (IRQ's), you can get it to work.
If you find
an older card that is not PnP, simply set the jumpers on the card
for an available IRQ and available DMA settings. One note here, the default
IRQ and DMA settings are highly recommended. Older software expects the
IRQ and DMA settings at specific numbers to recognize them as Sound Blaster.
The Sound Blaster®
family includes lots of different cards. Each card has specific
features. The cards I have used include the Sound Blaster®
basic, the Sound Blaster® Pro, the
Sound Blaster® 16, the Sound
Blaster® AWE 32, the Sound Blaster®
AWE64 Gold, and the Sound Blaster Live® and Audigy®.
In every case, I have been impressed with the added
features, sound quality, and realism. Buy the best you can afford, and buy
Creative©.
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