The bad points about the soundblaster play

Hi all.
never thought I’d actually
be doing a double posting on this but I am.
I have a few points about the soundblaster play that I am not happy with.
1. while it seems ok with games and I have played with some 3dfx in the physical card its sadly not much.
Fact is when I tried to play with the new fsl engine deathmatch was running, the card switched off all the effects and ran it as stereo.
it looks like half the effects in fact do not work.
2. clipping.
While there is a slight quality improvement, the volume of the card for headphones really over 6 % is an overkill.
for a speaker its 20% on amped speakers but it is overkill.
The processing of music is quite nice.
However with speech it appears the card will crackle and cut out a lot, also is the fact that it will do this when pressing keys.
The effects are the same as my realtech card obviously you can adjust them but I was hoping that programs would access them on demand having them on all the time is no fun, believe me I have tried.
The 3d effect is nice but even so, I still don’t know.
in some cases quality is a bit less.
If you want to use it for music which is what I may end up using it for, then that’s fine.
But for standard games, and other such lot I won’t be using my soundblaster for that, the power of the card is just about as much as the realtech card in my laptop which is crap.
at least when this clips it doesn’t take everything with it.
And that’s another thing, it appears the control centre is an inaccessible overlay for the control panel, not much use.
while pushing buttons I muted sound and had to plug in another device to unmute the sound.
When switching to another device say for one program windows does not always reconfigure itself so I had to start another screenreader to switch nvda back to the sound mapper in order for me to get speech.
In short, I am finding it quite hard to find any reason to keep the sb play.
My idea was something that would run so I could run speech from one card and something from the other.
With all the issues I am having with the card, I am no longer sure.
I do hope that I can get the card configured right and maybe it works.
If I keep it I will use it for music only maybe though to be honest the only time I have found it usefull is listening to midi on headphones and there is not even a midi device in the card.
For 38 dollars I guess its not to bad but I have no idea what I will use the card for.
For normal stuff my realtech works well.
I guess if I have it loaded to my amp, have everything including windows going over the card and then using it for winamp only and maybe Skype and teamtalk which may be all I use it for who knows.
Its not a card I’d use for speech.
later