Well this is finally one of the read worthy reviews around. The Tech-Report has been working hard on this comparative review covering the basics of 3DSound and six different soundcards: Hercules / Turtle Beach / Philips and Creative Labs make their stand in the review. In most cases, the differences we uncovered here aren't anything to write home about. The Muse XL was notably slower than the rest in the benchmarks, but otherwise everything was pretty even. As for the listening tests, all of the differences we heard were the results of back-to-back tests, but no matter what we said about any of the cards, none of them were objectionable. The days of ISA Sound Blasters that hiss like a cat are gone; unless there's a really bad card out there that we didn't include, the state of PC sound today is that even the worst card sounds pretty darn good. If one were to listen to any of these cards by itself, one probably wouldn't find any gross deficiencies in audio quality (with the possible exception of the overdone EAX effects in Serious Sam, but we're not sure whether to blame that on the sound cards or the game developers).

Comprehensive Soundcard Round Up