# Should I ditch my soundcard?



## LAN_deRf_HA (Oct 31, 2011)

I gave my Forte to a friend and got a deal on a Titanium HD. He started having crackling issues and during the course of looking up the issue and discovering what an epic pandemic it is I start having the same damn problem. It's a problem with the drivers that has no solution. They can't recreate it in the lab which I can only attribute to utter incompetence if it's so insanely common. Between having to restart the driver every so often to lessen the crackling and the whole not being able to drive my HD 598s nearly as well as the Forte I'm just about sick of dealing with soundcards.

Even with fixing the crackle I'd still be left knowing that one of these days I'm going to power off my pc and have the damn driver's lose my card so then I have to go wipe out 200-400 registry entries to do a fresh driver install. The only hope is there's rumblings that Windows 8 has much improved audio handling but do I really want to wait half a year for something that might not fix jack shit.

I'm considering getting another Denon AVR-1612 with some RC-10s or CB-20s and hooking it up with HDMI. The one thing holding me back is I don't think I can get open al processing in games going that route. A mild issue now but with Windows 8 and the return of hardware sound I might miss it more and more. 

You know this shit should not be this complicated. Somebody is blowing it at every turn and we have to pay the price. Messed up part is now that I think about it I had little crackling issues from day one on that Forte too but it was limited to a few flacs and other people with different cards reported the same stuff with flacs, but when I plugged my phones into the Denon and used HDMI everything was flawless.


Side notes, Forte driver package and installer = awesome.
Titanium HD drivers = skimpy but mildly overhauled compared to all other X-Fi card drivers. They're much more responsive in the control panel. Also the HD sucks balls for headphones. I think it's "dedicated headphone amp" doesn't actually exist.


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## MatTheCat (Oct 31, 2011)

LAN_deRf_HA said:


> I gave my Forte to a friend and got a deal on a Titanium HD. He started having crackling issues and during the course of looking up the issue and discovering what an epic pandemic it is I start having the same damn problem. It's a problem with the drivers that has no solution. They can't recreate it in the lab which I can only attribute to utter incompetence if it's so insanely common. Between having to restart the driver every so often to lessen the crackling and the whole not being able to drive my HD 598s nearly as well as the Forte I'm just about sick of dealing with soundcards.
> 
> Even with fixing the crackle I'd still be left knowing that one of these days I'm going to power off my pc and have the damn driver's lose my card so then I have to go wipe out 200-400 registry entries to do a fresh driver install. The only hope is there's rumblings that Windows 8 has much improved audio handling but do I really want to wait half a year for something that might not fix jack shit.
> 
> ...



LOL. Creative suck.

Is it by any chance a PCI card?

I had the same problems with my PCI X-Fi card when I upgraded from an Athlon 4000+ to a Intel E8400. The problem was that I ran my front side bus at 230 MHz, which was out of synch with how the card liked to run and in some games, I got horrible cracking. Creatives answer was that I should underclock my CPU in order to get thier soundcard running properly!

When I just recently upgraded to my current rig, i decided that I was going to ditch the PCI soundcard and just go with the modern onboard HD sound. However, I immediately noticed a marked loss in sound quality and i decided to stick my old X-Fi in a PCI slot......and lo and behold, no crackling, works perfectly with the reason possibly being that the base clock on the Sandybridge mobos run only at 100MHz, with CPU overclocking being restricted to clock multiplier and voltage changes.


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## Widjaja (Oct 31, 2011)

Sometimes I wonder about how good the technical skills behind some of the sound card manufacturers.

My last Creative Sound card was a Audigy 2 ZS and it crackled.

My current sound card released a driver a couple of months ago which actually runs without constant 25% CPU usage.
Before then, there were no drivers available on the website which were useable.
The only driver which worked was the one which came in the box.
The sound card was released in 2007.


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## Frick (Oct 31, 2011)

It feels like it's a bit of a hit and miss with Creative. I have the Audigy 2 ZS (with the awesome front panel) and it's perfectly fine.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Oct 31, 2011)

This driver conflict crackling seems to be tied to pci-e X-Fi cards. Though it's funny you mention bus issues. I've always wondered if the fact that my gfx cards overclock like crap then overclock amazingly well when put into other rigs didn't have something to do with either my soundcard or network card causing a conflict. I guess if you can't engineer a proper driver you can mangle your hardware design too.


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## Super XP (Oct 31, 2011)

I  believe the XFi 2 resovled this issue. But Creative always had this crackling issue, dam annoying if you ask me.


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## xBruce88x (Oct 31, 2011)

I've always had crackling issues with their cards in certain games. from the SBLive to the AudigySE and ZS. So, i gave up on em lol.


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## robn (Oct 31, 2011)

Ironically Realtek provide excellent drivers and have done for some time, but aren't ever gonna make something worth more than a couple of dollars in component value. I plug in headphones and get to listen to every click and whine possible from all the interference my integrated sound picks up and lets through its chips. Oh well. I'd rather that than bad drivers.


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## Widjaja (Nov 1, 2011)

Frick said:


> It feels like it's a bit of a hit and miss with Creative. I have the Audigy 2 ZS (with the awesome front panel) and it's perfectly fine.



I believe so.

My Brother and I once had almost Identical systems
Same mother board, same amount of RAM, same speed P4, with the same sound card and he was not getting any crackles with his Audigy 2 ZS.

Who knows....maybe even the subtleties caused an issue.
Northwood or Prescott
4x 512 RAM or 2x 1GB RAM....who knows.

Or maybe just a manufacturing fault in the card as it did the same thing on other builds I installed the card into.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Nov 1, 2011)

Yes there's been plenty of reasons for it before, but the flavor of the year is def. driver related. Restarting the driver/OS solves it for a time.


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## Super XP (Nov 1, 2011)

Try ASUS sound cards.


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