Hi there,

I am just posting here to give my initial impressions of the Sonic Fury soundcard (Santa Cruz). I just received my card half an hour ago, and have just installed it and am listening to some music now.

Firstly, the card itself actually has Santa Cruz on it, so this is an identical card all right. The drivers for XP are 20Mb and took me 5 minutes to download. Quite a bit smaller than Liveware!

The installation was a breeze, except for my PC freezing after uninstalling the SB Live!

My initial impressions are that this sound card definetly sounds different to the SB Live. It seems to have a warmer, more refined sound, whereas the Soundblaster sounded cold, and at times, harsh, there doesnt seem to be much harshness with this card. I like a brighter sound than it ordinarily offers, so I boosted the high frequencies to a level I like, and then it sounded just right.

The bass is definetly tighter, maybe not quite as weighty as the Soundblaster, but the SB was muddy in comparison - I get the impression the Sonic Fury has higher quality bass.

Elsewhere, I get the impression of more detail with this card, it just seems to sound more natural, and I'm hearing bits of certain tunes that I never knew existed, and these are mp3s!

All in all, I feel at the moment like I'm adjusting from the sound of these two sound cards, because they do sound totally different, but overall so far, I am very happy with it.

Anyway, thanx to Gluegun and Roj for recommending it to me - there certainly is a difference, which I feel like I'm appreciating more by the minute!

I would say to anyone else who wants improved sound quality over the SB Live to go for one of these - if you have good speakers you wont regret it.

PS I've just noticed that Winamp now uses 0% CPU on this below machine, which means mp3 acceleration must be working well!

Paul