Garbled audio

[Wizard]

Re: Garbled audio

Older boards had shared IRQ on certain slots, later ones went away with it with newer chipsets for PCI and PCI-E came around. Your mainboard manual will note this if there.

BTW, that's good choice of board (intel chipset, yay).

This is reasons PC is always easily accessible to check on every 6-12 months for fan function and dust build up. PS: My main pc at home had PSU fan seize and bloated the teapo capacitors and I didn't realize this till next check came around. Groan. I now always replace any fans with dual ball bearings type that I know is good design or salvaged from quality stuff.

Cheers, Wizard

[pentium]

Re: Garbled audio

Actually, my onboard realtek sound is enabled as I'm using it to output a stereo line to my wireless headphones. My Audigy currently runs in 4.1 mode so the headphones were not working right with it. I'll try disabling it and see what happens.

[kc8adu]

Re: Garbled audio

try the card in another system?

[kikkoman]

Re: Garbled audio

let me guess... more than 2gb RAM

[pentium]

Re: Garbled audio

Yes, 3gb of ram which is the max a 32-bit system will handle.
I don't have any other spare sound cards handy either.

Also, I'm stuck now. I moved the card around again, windows repalced the drivers with its own on reboot so I reinstalled the Creative drivers and now I'm stuck with a window saying "Updating windows drivers. This will take a few minutes" and it has already been half an hour.

EDIT:
Oh, I just found out there was a "this is not a signed driver, do you want to install it anyways?" windows that was being hidden by the driver installation program.
I'll flush the driver and try again.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Garbled audio

actually the guy with the esr suggestion is right. test it, audigys come with pretty crappy caps.

meanwhile try these drivers, if you have vista or above the creative drivers are broken with my audigy2 zs, these work wonders: http://nomoregoatsoup.wordpress.com/...driver-pack-2/

[kikkoman]

Re: Garbled audio

nope... if stumbled upon the explanation on the kX forums.

This affects ALL versions of windows.
XP x86, however, is less likely. It is not guaranteed to happen, but is very likely with more than 2gb of ram.

Problem:
"The card's hardware does not recognize addresses above 2 GB (uses a 31 bit (=2GB) DMA mask or something like that), so if Windows happens to create the buffers below that 2 GB barrier than it will work, if not, it will not work."

Symptoms:
Scratchy sound
Clicking/randomness
No sound at all (Except from inputs, such as Mic)

this was kx related, but the official drivers are known to have this issue too.
fixed in the latest kX release. one more reason to use these excellent drivers.
yes, i'm a kx fanboy.

[pentium]

Re: Garbled audio

nope... if stumbled upon the explanation on the kX forums.



this was kx related, but the official drivers are known to have this issue too.
fixed in the latest kX release. one more reason to use these excellent drivers.
yes, i'm a kx fanboy.

Can you explain to me these KX drivers and what improvements they bring and will it support all my hardware as well as EAX?
When I originally got the card the sound quality was almost perfect but then one day it god worse and then a week later it was trash.
Also, I did a "royal flush" (removed all my plug and play drivers from the device manager and forced the system to reinstall them) and while the drivers were reinstalling the audio was notably getting worse and worse (as in when I logged in the sound was fine but by the time the last driver had loaded it was garbled again).
Also, I have no ESR meter so I have no way to check the capacitors.

[kikkoman]

Re: Garbled audio

it's a driver package for EMU10k1 and 10k2-based cards that has been written completely from scratch.
the main advantage is the transparency and level of control you have over the DSP (compared to the Creative drivers) .
for instance you have full routing control over the I/O, plus a large database of addons and plugins that can be loaded into the DSP (and thus executed in hardware).
ASIO (which is far from reliable in the official drivers) is way better quality-wise IMHO than DirectSound even just for audio playback (and allows for ultra-low latencies if you need them).

for a good overview you should look into the official site:
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/faq.php?language=en

(may be a bit outdated on some points, check the forums for the latest versions and updates).

as for EAX: one of the weaker points.
the drivers are not meant for gamers and EAX seems to be abitch to reverse engineer (besides legal issues) but i've used a 7.1 system with it for years and there were only two or three games (Assassin's Creed was the last one) that wouldn't work.

i've gone back to stereo a while ago and i don't regret it. spatialization is excellent with these drivers anyway, and the flexibility of the DSP outweighs the missing EAX by far.

besides that, surround sound (dolby, dts etc) work flawlessly.

[pentium]

Re: Garbled audio

Oh, I remember it now.
You were also haggling me to use these drivers back when I was struggling to get my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 to work.
I'm in the midst of processing music files but after that I'm going to first poke anround and see what resources the sound card si sharing. I briefly glanced and it was sharing the same IRQ at the least with the onboard Realtek sound chipset.

[pentium]

Re: Garbled audio

By pure chance I was playing garbled ABBA and I transferred a file off my server and the audio very noticeably cleaned up but as soon as the transfer finished it went back to garbage again. I moved the file back to the server and it did it again.
This is sounding REALLY suspicious.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Garbled audio

lol maybe a pci-socket power problem?

[pentium]

Re: Garbled audio

Is that even possible?
I know the biggest users of power on my PCI bus short of the sound card (or the PhysX card if it was still installed) is probably my two VIA-chipset USB/Firewire cards but I have them also drawing off the PSU directly.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Garbled audio

Sure it's possible.
All it would take is a cold solder joint to the slot.

BTW:
The PCI BUS doesn't have power.
The PCI BUS is a data BUS and it's separate from the power plane.
They just both happen to go to the PCI slots.
.

[Wizard]

Re: Garbled audio

Even that, a noisy PCI card can shake the supply voltage on the supply bus for the slots.

Is your PhysX pulled already? Checked the caps on mainboard (had they been recapped lately)? And PSU caps?

Also what the reason for 2 USB/firewire cards? There are sufficient USB ports on mainboards. (Usually 4 to 6 USB 2.0 on intel chipset).

Also, there are good USB/firewire chipsets, and VIA is not among these. People who pull much transfer and most reliable USB cards find there is few chips that is good, and VIA is not one of these. Unfortunately.

Cheers, Wizard

[pentium]

Re: Garbled audio

Yes the card is pulled and yes the caps on the motherboard are good and of good brand. I'm not opening the PSU however as I trust Corsair and I got this PSU a little less than six months ago.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Garbled audio

yeah corsair psu should be good... the caps on the mobo might be good butmaybe something wrong with power circuit besides caps? which audigy is it? and do you have the front bay?

[pentium]

Re: Garbled audio

The card and the front bay came in the Audigy 2 ZS platinum package.
Also, I now find that regardless of a cold or warm boot or reboot, the audio is trash until you leave they system alone for about a day, at which point you can come back and the audio works perfectly. It feels so erratic. I can't say a cold joint as it happens on a warm boot but I also can't say a conflict as it fixes itself on its own.

Am I going in circles yet?

[Wizard]

Re: Garbled audio

That is a one of clues. What is software or hardware DOING when audio is grabled, and what is doing when audio is clean? Need to find good software to monitor this.

Cheers, Wizard

[toastygoodness]

Re: Garbled audio

if you have windows vista or 7 go into elevated command prompt and see:

powercfg -requests

something might be requesting an audigy audio stream.

what is your sample rate/bit depth and exclusive mode settings?