looking for sound card with input monitoring
 

I have been on the market now for sometime and am very frustrated with the reviews about the microphone abilities on all the sound cards on the market these days. I need to have the feature to hear myself talking with almost no latency. I'll be using headphones so feedback should not be an issue. I do require really good mic monitoring, good 5.1 sound through the 3.5mm jacks as I will be connecting Tritton ax pro's, and I prefer pci express over pci. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm pretty sure there isn't a single computer sound card released in recent years that isn't capable of input monitoring. Not to mention most onboard sound cards are capable of 5.1. If you're not looking for any sound quality improvements, save yourself the money.

ASIO4ALL. Creative cards tend to take less fiddling to get ASIO working than ASUS if you decide to go aftermarket.

then it sounds like Asus is the manufacturer I need to be looking at then. I read up on asio as I was not sure what that was exactly. Its sounds like to me that it allows the application to connect directly with the sound card correct? and this would mean better.....Maybe I don't know as much as I thought. So will most asus cards feature this and does this mean better mic monitoring or what? by the way, thanks for the quick reply. Very pleased with my stay hear at hardware Canucks.

No creative is the brand you need to look at :ph34r: Until ASUS gets off their butts with their ASIO drivers.
You have the gist of ASIO, it just allows applications to use the sound device directly instead of processing through OS components.
Most soundcards today support ASIO2.0. ASUS just decided to drink too much beer the night of designing their drivers, so ASIO doesn't work that well for some reason (I've only done this on my D2x, which is meh).

I think Zlojack has a creative titanium in the FS section

I miss understood your previous post sorry about that. Awesome so creative is still the way to go. They always have been as far as I understood. I will leave the thread up still if someone could tell me their experience with some sound cards from creative that they have. I am not looking for great sound quality, but definitely true 5.1, 7.1 sound not emulation. And it must have mic monitoring. Anyone have any comments/recommendations for me?

I've been looking at some Creative cards that are being sold on newegg and according to the reviews the whole mic monitor or line in monitoring feature has bugs of one sort or another. One of the main things is Latency. I can't have latency. At least nothing noticeable like 200ms or greater I would imagine. I have been on the market for one main thing: Headphones. I decided for a wile that I was going to go with the Tritton axpro's which would then require me to get a good sound card. Problem now is the sound card thing is not going well. Could still use some feed back though so I'll be looking forward to new reply's

I'm running an Auzentech Prelude

There are two ways to enable mic monitoring through this sound card and it would be the same with any creative driven product. Most likely very similar for others as well. The first and best way is with the software included with the card. There is very little delay when using this method on my computer.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...9f7dba45e8.jpg

The second way is through windows as displayed below. This method for some reason produces a horrible amount of delay, but it works.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...9f7dba55ec.jpg

Because the windows method doesn't enable ASIO

Don't pay attention to Jackquelegs,Asus Xonar is the way to go. I have had many Creative cards and NONE beat the Xonar. Auzentech is way better than Creative too. Auzentech uses much better quality parts than Creative. I have also had many Auzentech cards,but I still find the Xonar cards to be superior for true analog, and digital 5.1 surround.