Audigy bugs....errr...."features" :D

[Dr Mordrid]

http://nando.hpvip.com.br/essays/0303audigynogood.htm

http://nando.hpvip.com.br/essays/0303audigynogood00.htm

Dr. Mordrid

[Gurm]

This person is overreacting. EVERY SINGLE ONE of these problems (except the irritating startup .avi which isn't a "problem" so much as an "annoyance") is intermittant. I don't have ANY of them. Many many people don't have ANY of them.

I really get upset about excessive bashing of a card just because it's from Creative... just the same way that I get upset about bashing of all things MS just because they're from MS.

Hercules, on the other hand, deserves as much bashing as possible over the GTXP debacle.

- Gurm

[Nuno]

I don´t have any of those problems also. The audigy is a great card and a good upgrade from a live!, specially for gamers. With 3D sound on you can get up to 30% better performance than with the live!.

Oh, did I mention it sounds better too?

[Dr Mordrid]

It doesn't take much to sound better than a Live!

Overreacing? I don't think so....

1. You can call anything that doesn't happen at least 50% of the time "intermittant", but that doesn't make it less of a real issue.

2. What blows this out of the water is that Creative has admitted to the Soundfont, Soundfont octave and MIDI issues. This was documented by Ethan Winer and posted as part of his Audigy-lovefest "review" on Creatives own site!!

Also notable in this article is also that Creative is not saying how long it'll take to actually release the fixes, just as reported in the post I linked to. BTW: much of that posts info also came from Ethan Winer.

3. The "Squeal of Death" bug. Also admitted to by Creative and added to their knowledge base. This bug results in random lockups in Win2K and XP followed by either a string of beeps or a banshee-howl from the speakers. Wonderful.

Audigy guru's speculate that it's a PCI bus resource issue. BIG suprise.....NOT!!

4. As for other problems showing up frequently in the forums, they include AC3 losing synch over time, ASIO drivers not working properly, snap/crackle & pop (sound familiar?) etc.

If it takes Creative as long to fix these as it is still taking for the Live....

Dr. Mordrid

[The PIT]

Snap crackle and pop oh the 686b bug and Microsoft leaving the debug code in dx under win2k.
Two lives okay ones a 5.1 and no crackling or popping what so ever. Thats under win2k/98 and once upon a time under XP.
I've seen a few people mention the squeal of death over at viahardware.com but most are happy with it.
One thing I do find annnoying with my present creative setup is the disappearing speakers under win2k. No have creative fixed this with the latest soundcard?

[isochar]

Don't forget the BAD_POOL_CALLER nearly every multi-processor user experiences with the Audigy when playing though WAVout or DirectSound.

[Dr Mordrid]

Snap, crackle & pop also was a problem with Intel chips and was due to excessive bus loading and, with pre-5.1 boards, a faulty ACPI header. The header got fixed, but the bus loading never was. The VIA issue was a another matter that just exascerbated the problem.

I first ran into it with 5 SBL's I had installed to BX boards including the Asus P3B-F, which was one of the fastest BX's around.

This was during the Marvel betas. Among other things it was hitting the system timer interrupt constantly, as well as a few other pieces of weirdness related to the secondary IDE. Not all of this has been done away with, and some continues in the Audigy.

Dr. Mordrid

[Duty]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid

3. The "Squeal of Death" bug. Also admitted to by Creative and added to their knowledge base. This bug results in random lockups in Win2K and XP followed by either a string of beeps or a banshee-howl from the speakers. Wonderful.

Audigy guru's speculate that it's a PCI bus resource issue. BIG suprise.....NOT!!

Happened last night in JK2: outcast. I got the banshee-howl.


Jeff

[The PIT]

Just had the crackle and pop last night then I remembered that I'd re-installed win2k and forgotten to turn off the DX debugging code. Two seconds later no snap and crackle.