Audigy 2 card and Vista 32bit

mathias

So I got Vista 32bit home premium OEM and installed it on my PC yesterday ,
First impressions are that it looks really good , I like the aero thing , especially the cascading live screens , had two movies playing and they both kept going when I pressed the Logo + tab button , very impressive, but enough waffle , on to the issue ,

My PC is
Epox SLI mainboard
7800 GTX 256MB x 1
2 GB ram
Creative audigy 2 ZS platinum.

And some extras like a canon scanner , epson R340 printer etc.

Wireless worked straight off , quite a bit of hunting for the canon and epson Vista 32bit drivers but found them and they are now working.

The Audigy however ...... ouch!
There are only Beta drivers available , I get basic stereo , none of the features on the breakout box work , no inputs no surround outputs ,spdif passthrough is supposed to work but doesnt , and the sound jumps from very low volume to ear splittingly loud without warning and randomly , and there is a constant drumming from the speakers. Well ... it is a Beta !!

I tried to use the original drivers on the CD , but under Vista , when I try this , the disc says it cannot detect an audigy 2 on my system !

Has anyone got an audigy 2 with breakout box working on Vista ?Does anyone know a workaround for getting the xp driver to work ?

8T8

Don't waste time on the XP driver wont work Creatives drivers are a notorious & there are plenty of people complaining on their own forums over driver support.

Either wait it out and see if Creative deliver cough*don't hold your breath*cough or try the Kx Project a third party driver for Creative sound cards some reports are suggesting it is functional in Windows Vista and it supports the Audigy 2.

Rambo

8T8 wrote:

Don't waste time on the XP driver wont work Creatives drivers are a notorious & there are plenty of people complaining on their own forums over driver support.

Either wait it out and see if Creative deliver cough*don't hold your breath*cough or try the Kx Project a third party driver for Creative sound cards some reports are suggesting it is functional in Windows Vista and it supports the Audigy 2.

I using a Audigy Platinum and the beta driver lucky mine works ok not great
the sound is tinny compared to xp driver which I had theater sound

You have a on board sound card RealTek ALC65X AC’97
there is more support for this sound chip under vista

maybe use this while waiting for new driver to be written

Stephen

I had the tinny sound problem too - it turns out the default setting in the beta driver for bass and treble is way down, making everything sound like crap. I moved them back to the centre of the scale and it now sounds like it did on xp.

tman

They're fairly shocking alright...
the phono input on my breakout strangely works if i have the record source set to "what u hear"

hopefully creative pull their fingers out soon and deliver some fully functional drivers

/edit
thanks so much Stephen, it sounds so much nicer now:)

Rambo

Stephen wrote:

I had the tinny sound problem too - it turns out the default setting in the beta driver for bass and treble is way down, making everything sound like crap. I moved them back to the centre of the scale and it now sounds like it did on xp.

Thanks excellent sound working great again
does sound like xp driver
but still missing EAX in games example Half Life

Stephen

That's a whole other issue related to Vista

EAX used DirectSound 3D, which Microsoft have basically ditched in Vista. Vista uses OpenAL. EAX won't work until creative include some kind of wrapper in their drivers to tranlslate the EAX calls to OpenAL. Creative claim to be working on this at the moment.

edit: apparently they're only doing this for X-Fi drivers, so those of us with Audigies are sh1t out of luck.

Creative wrote:

Q: I have a Sound Blaster Audigy series card. Why isn’t it supported by ALchemy?

A: For the initial beta phase of Creative ALchemy, we made the decision to concentrate on products based on the X-Fi chip. Support for Audigy 2 and 4 class products will be determined as the current beta progresses and we are able to assess the quality of the beta and overall demand for Creative ALchemy.

RangeR

Stephen wrote:

apparently they're only doing this for X-Fi drivers, so those of us with Audigies are sh1t out of luck.

Man, that is not good news. I also found some info the other day that Vista doiesn't currently support more than one input source. I found this out when my Mic wouldn't work in TS.

Went into Sound Devices in Control Panel and saw that most of my devices were marked as ... I don't remember but they were not active or something.


I had to disable every input device [SPDIF etc] to get my Mic working. Nasty.

8T8

Dunno about the sound inputs can't say one way or the other if multiple inputs are supported or not I do think they might be because multiple microphones where demoed at one stage on Channel9.

The problem could be the sound stack in Vista has been completely re-written from scratch no legacy code at all in it. So drivers may not properly expose all the functionality in this early stage.

By default Vista soft disables inputs/outputs that are not in use at least from the systems I've installed on which may be to cut down on the dreaded interference or crackling in playback (at a guess on my part).

mathias

Audigy drivers released ,

http://ie.europe.creative.com/support/downloads/download.asp?searchString=SBAXVSD_PCDRV_LB_2_12_0002.exe

SPDIF passthrough now works , no 5.1 or DTS decoding though , and all the inputs seem to be working.