Well my sound card decided to bit the dust today. Since it has been several years since I looked into the sound card world I need a bit of advice. Which card do you suggest I look into that offers 5.1 surround? Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions.

For a nice card that won't break the bank, I've been very pleased with my Turtle Beach Montego Bay DSP card. I think it was 200 bucks a year ago when it first came out and has 5.1, and digital outs and was voted best sound card by a bunch of PC magazines.

Bryan,

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a look. I tried one of the Creative Labs cards and it did bad things to my PC.

I'm running a Turtle beach Santa Cruz in one system and an M-audio delta 1010LT in the other system. I'm happy with both, however, I should note that the noise floor on the Delta 1010 is significantly lower than on the Santa Cruz. The Delta can be had on Ebay for really cheap...like 200 bucks...well worth the investment, IMHO, especially if you do a lot of voice overs.

you might look at ECHO

http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/

GINA (street (ST) around $350) 2in/8 out
LAYLA ( ST. 700) 8in/8out
MONA 4in/6out was just discontinued - it has built in pre amp - you can find on ST 699-799

Turtle beach Santa Cruz, I've been pretty satisfied with this card on my editing machine. It's not king-o-the-hill, but is a good investment.

I use to be a sound blaster person until they had the issues you speak of in their MX series within the old BX motherboard chipset.

Also, be explicit by what you mean by "5.1". If you're just looking for a consumer card that can push Dolby Digital or DTS signals, then I'd go ahead with something from Turtle Beach or Philips. However, if you're thinking of doing 5.1 mixing or mastering, I'd look towards a pro card like an M-Audio or Echo with 6 outputs that can be setup in software like Acid or SONAR (can sonar do 5.1 mixing?) to output as discrete 5.1.

Kinda feels like you're just looking at the consumer stuff though. For that I'd put Turtle Beach, Philips, and Hercules in your comparason list. Now if M-Audio would just hurry up and release their consumer sound cards...

I'm happy with my MOTU 2408 MKII device. 8 in, 8 out plus interphasing possibilities with ADAT, digital mixer, etc. MOTU is making a 2408 MKIII now. Just set up which output goes to what speaker and mix away! (I have to admit that I don't do surround sound mixing. . . yet. It's just not a real interest. . . yet!) Software that enables surround sound mixing are Emagic's Logic (now for Mac users only :( );Steinberg's SX ; and Cakewalk's Sonar (I think).

Ted