I'm using ASIO4ALL with a SB-Live card at the moment. I'm not recording any audio with that set-up. My music making consists of sequencing VST instruments and recording MIDI.

Would I be likely to notice a drop in CPU usage if I was to replace ASIO4ALL+SBLive with say, an Audiophile 2496?

For reference I'm running a 2.6G Celeron, 1G RAM, and a Roland PC300 USB keyboard. Windows XP SP2. Host of choice is EnergyXT.

Thanks in advance

Cheers

I have used the KX-drivers v3538j (20ms) and ASIOx (10ms) with a SB-live card on a Celeron 2.4GHz for a year now ...

I have switched to an Opteron-165, and still using the SB-live card with the abovementioned drivers ...

what's the ms latenency on ASIO4ALL?

I'm getting ~24ms
Less than that and I get break-ups when using high CPU stuff like some Absynth programs

how do you set it to use more CPU but get less latenency?

I'm sure you'll see *some* drop in CPU useage. Dedicated ASIO drivers are a nice thing to have, and the Audiophile has got some of the best there are.
Shouldn't be that much of a drop though, but: You'll feel like some curtain has been removed from your speakers as well. The converters of an SBLive and an Audiophile are nothing to even start comparisons.

In addition, should you ever record some audio, it's very likely that you'll experience some recording offset (so the audio will be late). Has been like that on all machines I tried with to record through ASIO4All.

At the current price, for me it'd be a no-brainer. Why are you using an SBLive if you're running wonderful things such as Absynth?

Thanks for your replies everyone.



Can't imagine I'd ever try to record audio with the SBLive. I played with it once and there was a lot of operating noise (or whetever its called).



An excellent question. The answer is I'm getting one thing at a time as budget permits. But as you say, the Audiophile is very affordable. That's next on the list (or perhaps a CPU upgrade).

Thanks again

Adjust the ASIO Buffer Size slider in the ASIO4ALL control panel. Moving to the left reduces latency but raises CPU usage.

If I am wrong someone please correct me

Laraka,

I would advise you to try ASIOx or the KX drivers ... it should give you a lower latency than ASIO4ALL

(see post #2 for links)

That ain't right; I used an SBLive for years, with the KxDrivers and standard Creative drivers, and if there was one thing I could say for it, it wasn't very noisy. Something's wrong if you're getting some kind of audible noise.

That ain't right; I used an SBLive for years, with the KxDrivers and standard Creative drivers, and if there was one thing I could say for it, it wasn't very noisy. Something's wrong if you're getting some kind of audible noise.[/quote]

Well, you know, I experienced similar things in some PCs over the years (I had an SBLive in quite some of them additionally for compatibility reasons, etc).
Seems as if there's just some PCs catching up noise while others don't. In some cases it helped to remove the CD player cable (you don't need that anyways), it also helped to change PCI slots, but in the end things were unpredictable. Meaning that there's been no warranty the card wouldn't again catch up noise in another PC. Sometimes it might've been HDD action noise, USB activity noise, mouse zipper noise, PSU hum, whatever...
This never happened to me with Audiophiles. They were noiseless in any PCs.
Guess quality parts show off occasionally.

I hear you there. For example, my computer simply doesn't like ASIO soundcards. I can't get anything to work with it, despite immaculate tweaking on my behalf. I'd go run out and get an Audiophile, but after two soundcards, I have little reason to believe anything is going to work. Better luck next time.

Thanks, I will try those

Good to hear there is some hope for the sblive All I can add is that my old Creamware Pulsar (R.I.P. ) was silent in the same machine, whereas the SBLive has a lot of hum and noise when recording.

@ Sascha Franck: I will try your suggestions too. Thanks for the advice.

Cheers all

Try placing the SBlive in the last PCI-slot of the MotherBoard, i.e. as far away as possible from the Power Supply and CPU ...