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