The struggle, a story of me trying to do shit with old soundcards

[Bananasplit_00]

*warning*

This is a shit load of things to read, if you cant handle story time there is nothing for you here lol. with that said here's the story!

 

Ok so the story begins a week or so ago when I decided to shove a Creative SoundBlaster ZS in my computer, I had it lying around collecting dust so I just said to myself "Whats the worst that can happen lol?" and this is the story of the shit that happened:

 
I shut off my PC and put it on my kitchen table for surgery, touched the tap to ground myself or something and commenced with the operation. I scouted out that the second lowest slot on my motherboard was probably the best place to put it so it wouldn't interfere with my horrible, basically nonexistent, cable management. I unscrewed the cover and slotted the card in, I chose a pink screw and tightened the card into place, also just btw my mobo and PCI openings on the case don't line up that well so I usually have some problem installing new stuff in the case, I routed back the cables I had unplugged to fit it in and put it back in my room. I plugged everything back in except for my headset, flipped the switch on the powersuply and started the computer. It booted right up without any problems and everything seemed fine, I then proceeded to plug in my headset into the sound card and there was no sound, nothing. I was a bit surprised at first but then I remembered that I probably needed some drivers for it so I hoped on google and checked for them and the first result was to Creatives official website, this sound card was ofcourse marked as end-of-line and had no more real support but there was a driver from 2010 on there so I downloaded it and booted the installer. Everything seemed fine until it suddenly said "Please connect hardware you wish to install the drivers for and press OK" I was surprised because it was clearly installed in my case but I gave the PCI card a wiggle and then tried again, same error, and again, same error. At this point I was getting pretty pissed but I shut down the PC, removed the card and reinstalled it and the started it back up and now the driver installer was nice and let me install it. After several reboots during installation of the driver it was finally done so I plugged in my headset to the card again and still nothing, I realized it was not set as the standard unit in the sound controller after a little while and I fiddled around with it for a while to get the right thing selected and I think I deactivated something in the process but I'm really not sure what I deactivated.. I then tried again and after a while I could only get the sound out to work, not the mic but I was fine with that and used the motherboard for the mic and that worked just fine, and that's how I had it, until today. Today I found out that I actiually had the Audigy ZS Platinum Ex! I found a manual on how to install it and all the cables and the 3.25" extension just in a pile so installed them, did something about the shitty cable management and found some .25" David Clark headphones my dad had and reinstalled the drivers. After a LOT of trubble with it I got sound out of it, but with a lot of noice and almost worthless quality, so I started to google. After 10min of googling I found a solution, finally I found something that worked, the KX Project! I had some trouble with those drivers as well, not installing properly, but in the end I got them installed. I then spent about 20 seconds figuring out what to put as my standard playback unit and so on but in the end I got it working! I am right now listening to some music with my David Clark's and everything is working perfectly right now. Hope you enjoyed this read and respect to those who read all this . 

[Donk Quixote]

After all that, is there any noticable difference in sound quality?

[Bananasplit_00]

After all that, is there any noticable difference in sound quality?

yes i can hear it, it was worth it because it was free, but if i had to pay for all this i would have stuck with my headset and on board audio probably. the main difirance is that there is more detail in the music and it just has a difirent sound to it. i really like it but it took a while to get used to