[RESOLVED] Potential XP (?2k?) Audigy Crackle Fix

Hey everyone. I got myself an audigy the other day, was pleased with most of it but o'de natural' I still had my crackling. With my SBLive value I had turned the system volume way down and the speaker volume way up to avoid hearing this crackle. And by the way, if you are a really neardy person who liked Physics class in High School, get out your multi-tester (you all have one?) and read the bottom of the message. The fix in XP is, make it use the freaking 2k Drivers. When it runs the default installer on XP (the one on the CD) it uses the 98 drivers. Big oops. Run the installer, let it install the **** drivers when it asks you to reboot say no. Go into device manager, find your audgiy, select properties, update driver, advanced, specify location, have disk
and tell it to look here:
E:\Audio\English\Drivers\WIN2K (assuming E is the letter of your CDrom drive, wow, I haven't seen that in a computer manual for so long)
Now, this should DRAMATICALLY reduce your crackling. The remaining crackling I get was fixed by uppin the speaker volume and lowering the system volume.

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For all you nerd types who wanna find out Why creative is screwin us over? REad
Find an old dead PC speaker setup. Shave off the wire insulation (its old anyway right?) and touch the nodes of the multitester to the wire as far apart as possible (I stripped the whole wire to make sure, and put one node at the PC connection end and the other at the speaker connection end). Now set the multitester to measure the most sensitive amount of voltage. The whole point in doing this is to be able to HEAR the speakers while doing this so please be careful and dont short/cut the wire. Now...get a friend to play a game or AVI file that makes your system crackle. For any normal music you'll note the multitester showing spikes that are relative to how much noise is comming out of the speakers (My god man...how do you know this?). Well, when a scratch comes along in a game, I would always always ALWAYS see my needle spike all the way. What does this tell me? The Creative cards have a problem sending RAW voltage to the speakers, ouch. (This test was done on the SBlive Value, but I'm assuming the Audigy's crackling is caused the same way.)


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Alex Waskiewicz

"The Creative cards have a problem sending RAW voltage to the speakers"

Umm, well...

Fear not everybody, there is nothing unusual or suspicious about this. What is described is a normal phenomenon in electronic audio equipment, and is called clipping. It has two common sources.

One is being dealt with by turning the system volume down & the speaker volume up. This is analogue clipping, and is caused by an audio amplifier stage being driven with too large a signal in comparison with the supply voltage available to the amplifier. The peaks of the signal are clipped off as it rises to the limit of available voltage, and the result is crackly sound. It is likely to happen with any sound card if the input & master levels are set high and the external speaker volume set low. It can be a design weakness if it happens too readily, but is nothing strange.

The other source is digital clipping, which is a particularly harsh & annoying snappy crackle, and if severe enough will produce a direct current (D.C.) output for sufficient time to read on a voltmeter or ammeter. This applies to any digital equipment, and has nothing in particular to do with Creative, it just happens that their cards are the ones having the problem. Of course they should deal with the problem, whether it's timing faults, poor drivers, or just Creative's assumption that THEY set the standards, which inconvenient people like VIA fail to notice. Whatever, the D.C. component of clipping is a symptom, not the cause.

A much more useful way to view what is happening would be to use an oscilloscope, and incidentally the procedure described above is rather un-necessarily complex. It measures the current flow through the speaker by registering the very small voltage developed across the resistance of the wire leading to it. Since the speaker at these frequencies is almost completely resistance, (and at D.C. it IS just a resistance) the same result will be achieved by simply putting the meter across the speaker terminals on a higher voltage range.


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I used to be Platypus...

The platypus, proof God has a sense of humour.