Originally Posted by latrosicarius 
no........... your quality is not worse with a USB mic
The question is... with the advent of USB microphones and speakers which keep the signal digital for longer... what use is a sound card?
Now, if the sound card had USB pins/plugs and was able to accept the USB microphone and process it FOR the cpu, THEN, a sound card would be good to have still
It doesnt work like that, if your sound card had USB ports on it then the signal would still get sent via PCI to your CPU unless the microphone and soundcard has their own special little version of usb.
You understanding of analogue to digital converters is quite confused...
A USB mic converts the analogue wave form which it records into a digital signal to be sent to your system via usb.
A soundcard converts the analogue signal from the microphone into a digital signal to be processed.
If you want the soundcard to do all the processing then just use a normal microphone!
Originally Posted by dangel I think my next sound card won't be Creative - with Vista, OpenAL and games shifting away from EAX there's likely to be more choice. Creative's drivers are shockingly bad (even now) and I guess we should be glad MS have shunted them out of the kernel.
I ended up using modded Auzentech drivers on Vista64 - because with 4gb of RAM I just got five channels of constant white noise. Quality.
Where do you get modded Auzentech drivers from?