advice needed

I'm planning on getting a 5.1 soundcard. I'm not an audio fanatic so i'm gonna keep it cheap (within £20 to be precise)

When you say soundcard you instantly think creative. I've seen a Phillips Sonic Edge and it looks pretty good. Is this a good card? How does it compare to a Soundblaster Live! 5.1? Which would you guys recommend?

I'm guessing you'd all say soundblaster but I'll never know till i ask

Thanks

Phillips makes OK cards at the low end and good cards at the high end. My SB Live 5.1 was garbage.

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I spoiled myself with a Vortex2, with it's hardware equalizer custom balanced for my speakers, before trying the 5.1 Platinum. Ouch. I sold it to a guy who thought it was the greatest thing in the world.

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If you are not an audio fans, I think a card on the mainboard is enough and cheap.
If you are a lover of music, then the sound cards of creative is the good choice.
Creative also manufacture other sound card using 5880 chip. This kind of card is much cheaper.
As far as Philips is concerned, this company wasn't good at making soundcards.

The Live! series is absolute [-peep-], plain [-peep-], for anything other than stereo sound.

The Live! 2-channel processor works fine. Not great sound, but adequate. What Creative did, however, is instead of making a muli-channel processor, they are using two other 2-channel processors for the surrounds and the center/sub channels. Frankly, the other two processors could've come out of Bill Gate's butt for all the good they do. Sound is muddy, out of sync, just plain crap. If you want 5.1 sound, get a real sound card. Your budget is small, but there are some options, such as M-Audio and Terratec, as well as Santa Cruz.

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