Creative sound cards quality comparison

[W_Eagle]

The sound card chipset on my MOBO (ABIT IS7) sucks -- the gain is too high and there is a hiss in the background that I cannot eliminate, even when recording at a higher level and lowering the audio level with Vegas 5.
So, I need a separate sound card.

What I do is capture films from satellite and cable, process and burn into DVDs. I capture wave audio at 48KBps, converting it to AC3 with TMPGEnc XPress.

Is there any difference in quality between Creative Vibra 128 4D 4.1 PCI and Creative Sound Blaster Live 5.1 PCI?

Is there a better sound card for my purpose at a reasonable price?

Is there a better software than TMPGEnc XPress for converting 2 channels wave into AC3?

[Soopafresh]

What is your budget ? M-Audio has a great card for less than $100

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Revolution51-main.html

Those older Creative cards can crackle on certain motherboards. You'll save a bit of $, but inherit potential headaches.


2 Channel WAV to AC3 - FFMPEGGUI is pretty good, same with BeSweet

[W_Eagle]

Thanks for the reply.
We don't have M-Audio sound cards here in Israel. Anyhow, you didn't reply my question concerning the difference between those Creative cards.
The other localy available products are by ST Lab, Genius and Audiotrak. What I've noticed is that the more expansive cards offer more channels than 4.1 or 5.1 channels, higher than 16 bit and higher than 48 KHz sampling rate -- all of which I don't need.
The other Creative model is Audigy Player which is more expansive and I wonder whether it is any better than the other Creative models.
I doubt whether FFMPEGGUI or BeSweet, are better than TMPGEnc XPress, anyhow, I heard they don't produce fully compliant AC3 sound.