So, I have a Creative card that I use and no onboard/built in sound. I use Creative's control panel to set it to headphone mode since I'm always using headphones. There's still the option, though, through windows sound management to set it to 5.1, 2.1, headphones, etc.
So, pretty basic, what should I set everything to for the best sound clarity especially when it comes to 3D sound and surround sound in games? I also have that X-Fi Crystallizer from my sound card that I have no idea if I should use or not, so some info there would be appreciated, too. Same with EAX effects.
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I'm not an expert in sound, so don't take my word as gospel.
1. Use creative for everything. It may not matter too much, but your sound card might have different profiles for headphones vs your actualfact speakers.
2. From what I understand the crystallizer exists to restore some of the data that's lost with mp3 compression. It's not necessary for high quality sound sources, like what you're going to hear from a video game or a blu-ray, but might be nice for youtube videos or listening to music that was ripped at a lower bit rate.
3. EAX is the system your sound card uses to hardware-accelerate shifting sound based on direction and speed of travel. Video game stuff, mostly. Very few video games use EAX nowadays and instead do it all on the CPU regardless of if you have a sound card or not, but it's still nice to have.