1024 3D sounds is very optimistic, 1024 decoding buffers (mono not 3D enabled) you have ... on the latest creative xfi you have 128 3d sounds buffers minus as much speakers as you are using as speaker config, so for a quad speaker config, this leaves you 124 simultaneous 3D sound to play with, on audigy 60, on soundblaster live 28 (as on most soundcards) and on certain soundcards 0. Sometimes channels are played on the cpu (when no 3D hardware channels have been found), but this is the worst case scenario.