Soundcard with realtime microphone monitoring

Question

I have a soundcard (Audigy 2ZS), which is very old and very poorly supported in modern Windows OSes, but this sound card has very important feature - when I use microphone, I can hear my own voice through the headphones with absolutely NO delay (i.e. I can monitor my voice in realtime) - as opposed to standard windows feature of "playback of recording device", which creates a delay of ~1 second, which is unacceptable.

Is there a way to eliminate that delay in standard windows functionality?

Answer 1

You're really looking for a specific capability - called direct monitoring, which I've seen in some external cards. My M-audio Fast Track has that feature, and creative cards that support ASIO 2.0 - seem to typically support it as well.

Find a card with direct monitoring and you should be fine.