StarDestroyer.Net BBS

My Integrated soundcard having died on me, I went out today and purcheased a soundblaster LIVE 5.1 soundcard from my machine.

Got it installed without a hitch, but now the sound is distorted. I have gone through the troubleshooting, I have switched speakers, made sure the old soundcard(a VIA AC'97 sound controller) was disabled, no hardware or software conflicts

Does anyone know what the fuck is going on?

Drivers?

updated the drivers, still hasnt worked

Mess with the "hardware acceleration" and "conversionquality of samplefrequency" sliders, at least that's what those two are called in win98, not sure about other OS. I believe they are in the multimedia option in your control panel.

option does not exist

Alyrium Denryle wrote:option does not exist

Then what's your OS? I will look it up for winXP now...

WIn xp pro

This is really starting to piss me off

Especially because I dont feel right if I dont have music on in my computer room.

Control panel
Sound/Audio devices
3rd tab "Audio"
1st option, "playing sound" goto "advanced"
2nd tab has the sliders.

I had the same problem. It's Creative's stupid ass sound cards. I took it back and bought a Hercules. That solved the problem.

I've heard similar shit about the AC97 onboard sound thingies.

Try going into the BIOS. Since your old soundcard is an onboard one, there could be an option in the BIOS to disable this.


My motherboard has an onboard Video/Audio (forget which) and there's an option to disable it (which it is).

SBLive is a pretty bad sound card, but it shouldn't be distorted too badly. If you used the official Creative Labs drivers, check the Creative mixer program to see if any 'effects' are being selected.

I have a two spaker configuration, and for some reason there is less distortion when I optimize for a 5.1 system

I have tried all of the above, save getting into my BIOS and have uninstalled the old AC'97(which was dead)

Just tried to update drivers, and now it is saying that it doesnt detect my damn soundcard.

Seeing as Windows knows it is there...

phongn wrote:SBLive is a pretty bad sound card

It is? I have one and it seems fine (then again, it's hooked up to a pair of 10$ speakers, while upstairs is an SB16 hooked up to a pair of decent speakers with a subwoofer).

It's bad, particularly if you have older VIA-based motherboards. The S/N ratio is poor as its internal resampling method. If you have $10 speakers it hardly matters, though.

well I do have a VIA based motherboard... god damn it

Creative's drivers are very picky about the soundcard installed. If one version of the driver package doesn't work, try another. It may be that the "full" install will let you go ahead where the "drivers only" install balks. I had a similar problems updating the drivers on my own Sound Blaster Live! before it died a few months ago.

I have the full install, maybe I should uninstall and reinstall the drivers only?

Alyrium Denryle wrote:I have the full install, maybe I should uninstall and reinstall the drivers only?

If the installer complains about the card to begin with, it simply won't work, in my own experience. You may want to see if another driver package will even get past the "no card detected" screen before committing to replacing the drivers. I tended to have the most luck with installing the "universal" package (LiveDrvUni-Pack(ENG).exe), but I don't know how well that would work for you.