A 5% drama?
My issue with Creative/SoundBlaster is distortion and tinny quality. Creative/SB has always been a budget audio card, as far back as the 90s. And I didn't like it then, either.
Turtle Beach is part of Voyetra. As jwillis recently pointed out in a thread, in the 90s, and 00s (when the Santa Cruz came out), they were more into higher-end audio, the sort of products audiophiles would drool over in the
B&H print catalogs. Both Turtle Beach and Voyetra invented some of the technology found in digital audio.
Turtle Beach has always reminded me of Pro Audio Spectrum/Studio cards, ISA cards that were ahead of their time in the 90s. The cards made Creative and AdLib cards, the popular cards of the day, sound wholly inferior. These cards were extremely popular among the advanced hobby and pro/semi-pro audio crowd. I had the PAS back in 93/94, and my digital audio knowledge actually pre-dates my digital video knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_Beach_Systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_..._AudioSpectrum
Now then, I don't want to come down on the Audigy too hard here. In terms of Creative distortion/tinny issues, the Audigy wasn't as bad as cards before it, nor some that came after it. The biggest issue was it hated ATI AIW setups all through the 00s, usually due to the motherboards (VIA, especially).
I have an Audigy in my backup box, so I'm not saying it's fit only for the landfill. But rather given a competition between the two cards, I don't consider it a competition at all. The only way I'd install the Audigy is if the TBSC totally didn't work, or had some sort of weird error that cause the system to reject it entirely. And that seems to be what sanlyn ran into. It happens.
Both are usually better than the onboard option.
Note that some of the distortion/tinny issues can't be heard on low-quality speakers. It's not until using reference/near-reference, or even just good home audio gear, sometimes even just a good set of TV speakers, that you notice. Anybody using $50 or less compute speakers will never hear a difference.
