[marsan]

I have to say, I first played Sam & Max - Season 1, episode 1-4 on my Creative Soundblaster Live card(which is still in my PC actually, since Linux doesn't have drivers for my new X-Fi card yet) and there I had no sound problems what so ever. It never bothered me a bit that the sound was low bitrate ogg files, mostly because this card is amazing at creating a good sound image without exposing the low bitrates. But on the downside, this card has some horrible problems with some DirectX 9 based games, or actually, it's the games that has problems with the card, because it's just with a few certain games(like Oblivion and Broken Sword 4, which were why I decided to get a new soundcard).

Anyway, when I played Reality 2.0, on my new X-Fi card, I noticed what people are talking about. I can hear some scratching if I listen very carefully, and it actually got more annoying during some conversations than others. Actually, it was better with songs than conversations. The songs in game didn't annoy me, but the conversations sometimes did. I bet on some other soundcards it would've been really annoying.

So my diagnosis? Get a Soundblaster live! card. Um... bad solution, you say? hmmm... Anyway... yeah, seems like this is a issue with certain cards, and it actually seems like older sound cards tend to have less problems with low bitrates than newer soundcards.