Sound Blaster Audigy Troubles

[PowerHungry]

How have your experiences been with Creative's new Audigy cards? I am planning to replace my SB Live! b/c I think I damaged the external inputs and occationally and intermittently get crackling that ranges from bothersome to shutting off the speakers.
Anyway, I want to upgrade and get some new technology to replace my Live! and I want to know everyone's opinion on the card.

[Rags]

Been running mine for a couple of weeks now, mostly under win2k and the card is a definite improvement over my Live. Just upgraded to XP and so far so good...no complaints yet.

Rags

[Tom]

I've had my oem Audigy (under WinXP) since
October 26 with no problems whatsoever....
no question that it is superior to my oem SB Live!
in every way.

[orangejulius]

... the card is a definite improvement over my Live. -Rags
... no question that it is superior to my oem SB Live! -Tom

How, exactly?

Better drivers?
Huge difference in sound quality?
Do you like the ContentPass protection?

Speaking of which, anyone know how ContentPass works?

Couldn't find much except:

Audigy does indeed support ContentPass protocols which may in the future be used to prevent unauthorised playback of unsigned MP3s etc on your computer ...

[Indiana]

Re: Sound Blaster Audigy Troubles

Originally posted by PowerHungry
b/c I think I damaged the external inputs and occationally and intermittently get crackling that ranges from bothersome to shutting off the speakers.

Well since you're using Win2k you first should know that "occassional clicks" and sometimes muted output is a widespread and known problem with the Live (or better Creatives drivers) and Win2k.
So maybe your card is not faulty, it might just be down to Creatives CRAPPY drivers...

And who can tell if Creative really at once started to write decent drivers with the Audigy? Such things normally take quite a long time (look at ATI).

Again, I'd have a serious look at the Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96. More detials

[Rags]

Originally posted by orangejulius


How, exactly?

Better drivers?
Huge difference in sound quality?
Do you like the ContentPass protection?

Speaking of which, anyone know how ContentPass works?

Couldn't find much except:.....

No crackling pops and cough ups when listening to winamp and compiling in VC, or transferring large files. Multiple sounds work as designed. The muted sound is quiet. The sound is an improvement for sure. The drivers seem pretty solid so far. As far as content pass, that's akin to getting upset over RealAudio having media that cannot be copied or burned. No big deal, I can still make mp3's, burn them, and distribute them however I so choose.

Rags

[PowerHungry]

Indiana - I am 99% sure it is the card, the same thing happened to my Ensoniq Audio PCI a few years back, overloaded the input and blew the card. It worked for a few days with the crackling/static then quit. It has also done it on Win98SE, WinME, and Win2k. I have searched all along these forums and and followed all of the advice therein, to no avail. Another thing, if I mute all inputs (CD Audio, Aux, Line IN) the crackling never occurs, and it occurs, it goes away when muted.

[Tom]

Originally posted by orangejulius


How, exactly?

Better drivers?
Huge difference in sound quality?
Do you like the ContentPass protection?

No trouble with drivers....
MUCH better sound quality......no pops/crackles/hiss
ContentPass protection? What's that?

[The PIT]

Sblive and Sblive 5.1 no crackles and pops here.

[Paulr]

Well I never had any crackles of pops with my SB Live! Value either, but there, I'm an Intel user through and through - pretty sure those issues were only with AMD based systems.

Audigy been in my system for around a month now - lovely card.

[Rags]

Originally posted by Paulr
Well I never had any crackles of pops with my SB Live! Value either, but there, I'm an Intel user through and through - pretty sure those issues were only with AMD based systems.

Audigy been in my system for around a month now - lovely card.

Actually it wasn't isolated to AMD systems. It affected ALL systems running win2k, but it only happened under certain conditions on intel systems.

Rags

[dZeus]

I used to have a SBLive! as well (on a BX system), and now I have a Santa Cruz on a i815 board.

The SBLive! did the occasional crackling, like when playing an mp3 while starting a program that's very hdd/cpu intensive, like photoshop, or something similar. Also auto-scrolling in IE5 with webpages that have loads of images on it would help a lot with (re)producing the crackles.

Funny thing is under exact the same conditions on the i815 board with the Santa Cruz, the output doesn't crackle, but just gets dropped for a split second... not much better actually.

I think the problems with the Creative cards and the so called 'advantage' with other cards like Santa Cruz et al are all overdone, because bashing creative seems to be some sort of mass-hysteria lately.

Each soundcard has it's share of problems, and creative cards don't stick out above other manufacturers imho.

[The PIT]

Forgetting of course the microshaft left the debugging code in dx8 for win2k. That what caused crackling for me and was easily solved.

[Indiana]

DZeus, I'm quite sure you don't do full-res vid-capturing, otherwise you'd notice a difference between the SantaCruz and the SBLive, at least in Win2k.
And the sound quality of the SantaCruz is better as well.

[Nuno]

Audigy, yikes!
I bough today (it´s Christmas time after all ) a sb audigy player. I needed a soundcard to finish building my wife´s computer, and instead of buying something el-cheapo, I decided to kindly give her my Live!
I also have been offered a brand new copy of WindowsXP professional (more on that latter) and I´ve been trying it the last couple of days.

Well, removing the live! and inserting the audigy on exactly the same pci slot managed to completly bomb out winXP on installing the drivers from the cd. The funniest of it all was that the cd-rom couldn´t be recognised anymore, so I couldn´t reinstall the drivers.

So I changed the card one slot up and reinstalled winXP... maybe the firewire thingie sharing IRQ 11 with the video card and the sound device sharing with usb controller was to much to the all-mighty XP to handle

Everything is working fine now. Not a big diference from the live! if you ask me. Yes, it sound slightly better, and maybe a couple of fps on games due to less cpu utilization. Apart that you never know when a firewire port gets handy and I really was looking forward to Giants, the bundled game.