Review- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy

Review by Konrad Moszczynski, call sign: Omega X

May 10, 2002

Installation:

Minimum System Requirements

• Genuine Intel® Pentium® 266MHz, AMD® K6 300MHz or faster processor
• Intel®, AMD or 100% compatible motherboard chipset
• 64MB system RAM (128MB Highly Recommended)
• 600 MB of free hard disk space
• Windows® 98, 98SE, Windows NT® 4.0, Windows® 2000 or Windows® Millennium Edition (Windows XP and other future driver releases will be available from www.soundblaster.com)
• Available half-length PCI 2.1 compliant slot for Sound Blaster® Audigy™ card
• Available adjacent slot for Audigy extension card
• Headphones or amplified speakers (available separately)
• CD-ROM drive required for software installation
• Available 5 1/4" PC drive bay (for Sound Blaster Audigy drive)

Additional Requirements

• CPU: Genuine Intel® Pentium® II 350 MHz / MMX or AMD® 450 MHz / 3Dnow! for SB1394 applications or games
• SB1394: Works only on Windows® 98 SE, Windows® 2000 or Windows® Millennium Edition.
• DV Editing: 128MB recommended for Digital Video (DV) capture and editing. Ultra DMA hard disk with 1GB workspace (ATA-100, 7,200rpm with 6GB recommended.
• Games: 128MB system memory recommended, a 3D accelerator with at least 8MB of texture RAM, available 300-500MB disk space. Games may not work optimally under Windows 2000. Check out latest updates from www.soundblaster.com.
• DVD: At least a 2nd generation DVD-ROM drive with these recommended soft-DVD players: Intervideo's WinDVD 2000 or CyberLink's PowerDVD 3.0 and above
• Internet Radio: Requires at least a 56Kbps modem and an active Internet connection before running the application.

The install was done on Windows XP. Windows quickly detected that the multimedia card was present. The FireWire link was instantly installed, but I was prompted for drivers which are contained on the Audigy CD. On the CD there are many bundled utilities and applications to use along with the Audigy Gamer. You may customize your install by choosing from the menu of programs to be installed

·         FireNet 2.0 – This is primarily for non-Windows XP system to allow for the creation of a FireWire network.

·         Goldmine Demo – This is only to see Creative show off their new technologies incorporated with the card.

·         Play Center 3.0- Is included to replace most of your multimedia software used for playing, ripping and burning mp3s/wma’s.  If you like an all in one application this is for you.

·         Oozic Player – Creates a 3D environment that responds to the music tempos, rhythms, and frequencies as it is played.

·         SonicBox Tuner – Is a free streaming audio application to listen to radio and mp3’s online.

Some of the Creative utilities included are:

·         Creative TaskBar – It is basically what they call it, a taskbar that floats atop your screen to give you quick access to utilities and programs associated to the Audigy Gamer

·         AudioHQ – Allows you to configure your Audigy Gamer. If you are going for a slim install I recommend including this in it.

·         Surround Mixer – Is a Creative replacement for the windows play control.

·         Creative Recorder 2 – Records Wav. Media.

·         Creative MiniDisc 2 – Records media to Minidisc. It makes MiniDisc recording easier by allowing your MiniDisc to distinguish between tracks.

·         Creative Diagnostics – A Handy utility to be sure you have your sound card configured properly and that your speakers are plugged in to the correct channels.

·         Creative WaveStudio – A basic Wav editor. It won’t keep up with professional media editing but can occasionally be useful to do some sound editing.

·         SoundFont Banks – An assorted collection of instruments for the creation of MIDI media.

Creative also recommends that Windows XP drivers be obtained via their website.

A problem that KT7, KT7a, KG7, KR7, KR7a (RAID) users may experience is crackling during heavy load on the PCI bus. This can be resolved by following theses tips provided by Paul’s Unofficial Abit FAQ. For the KR7/KG7 family of motherboards potential solutions include:

• Under Windows XP, ensure you apply the correct Windows XP patch for the Audigy. Note that the initial release of this patch does not support Creative's "RemoteCenter" (infrared control software) or the "Creative Recorder". Creative also warn that the Creative Taskbar is not currently XP compatible. These incompatibilities will be fixed in a subsequent upgrade. The driver update is called ADGXPDrvUpdate.exe.
• Crackling can often be caused by the master volume on the sound mixer being set at 100%. Try reducing it to 80% or so and using your hardware volume control instead. Note that there are some reports that the initial driver releases may cause the volume control to occasionally get reset to 100%.
• Disabling ACPI can resolve crackling by changing the means by which interrupts are shared on the computer
• Installing the latest VIA IDE miniport driver may resolve the problem by improving the use of bus mastering by hard disks on the PCI bus.
• Update your Highpoint drivers to the latest version
• Try running the "Creative Restore Defaults" program found in the Soundblaster Audigy directory
• Are you using a PS/2 mouse? Try changing to a USB mouse - this resolved all crackling issues on my machine. Presumably a USB mouse places different demands on the PCI bus compared with a PS/2 mouse.
• If you have a RAID motherboard, try disabling either the VIA IDE controller or the Highpoint controller by moving all your disks onto one or other of the controllers. This reduces the load on the PCI bus.
• Try installing the 4in1 drivers both before and after installing the Audigy drivers. One user found that v4.35 of the drivers resolved crackling.
• Try unzipping the driver installation file by hand, then running the setup.exe program with the /w parameter (ie. "setup /w").
• If during driver installation under WindowsXP the computer claims it cannot find the Audigy card, try the following. First, make sure all previous drivers are removed. Go through the following steps to do so:
• Open My Computer, Properties, Hardware tab. Click on Driver Signing.
• Select the option: "IGNORE - INSTALL THE SOFTWARE ANYWAY AND DON'T ASK FOR MY APPROVAL". Click OK.
• Click Start, Control Panel, then "Add or Remove Programs" and remove all Creative applications relating to the sound card.
• Insert the sound card's installation CD.
• Go to Start then Run... and type: X:\AUDIO\ENGLISH\DRIVERS\CTZAPXX.EXE
  where X is your CDROM drive letter.
• Click OK and follow the instructions to remove the drivers.
• Reboot when prompted.
• The sound card will be detected by Windows as a "PCI multimedia audio device" and prompt the "Add New Hardware Wizard".
• Cancel the "Add New Hardware Wizard".
• Click Start then Run... and type: X:\AUDIO\ENGLISH\DRIVERS\CTZAPXX.EXE
  where X is your CDROM drive letter.
• Download the Windows XP compatible Audigy drivers. Select "Save to disk" and download the update to "My desktop" or "C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP".
• When the file has completed the phase of being transferred to your computer, locate the file AUDRVWDM.EXE on your desktop and double-click the file.
• The driver update utility will initialize and begin the phase of updating your sound board drivers. Follow the instructions carefully.

If it is still telling you that it can't detect the Audigy, try the following steps:

• Verify the file name of the download is AUDRVWDM.EXE.

o        Extract the file into a temporary directory; the update can be extracted with WinZIP, WinRAR, or WinACE. Once the file is extracted, update the drivers with the "Update Device Driver wizard" in the Device Manager; the drivers are located in the DRIVERS folder

• If you have problems installing the drivers under Windows 9x/Me try the following:
• Starting from a clean install of Windows, let the OS detect the card. If the card shows up under "other device" with a question mark in Device Manager remove the device and reboot. It is important for Windows to properly detect the card as a Sound device.
• Once the OS has detected the card and the install wizard pops up, cancel the wizard.
• Reboot into Safe Mode. Use Ctzapxx to install the vxd drivers. If Safe Mode does not offer CD support you may need to first copy the drivers from the CD onto the hard disk.
• Reboot. You should hear the Windows sound as your machine boots.
• Install the software (and drivers unfortunately!) from the CD.
• Reboot
• KR7A(-RAID) only: Disable APIC in the BIOS (this is the default)
• KR7A(-RAID) only: Install the VIA PCI latency patch and update to BIOS 6N or later
• KR7A(-RAID) only: Several people are reporting severe problems with the Audigy series of cards and the KR7A(-RAID) when running WindowsXP. Typically the drivers appear unable to install correctly resulting in the card being unrecognized by the system. There is no known solution at present although it should be pointed out that it is possible to get this combination working - I am using this combination on my system without difficulty or any special modifications. However, it is currently not clear what the difference between a working and non-working setup is. There is some evidence that this may be due to a bad batch of Audigy cards as some users have resolved this by replacing the card with another identical one. Apparently Creative Support in France are telling customers that "It has nothing to do with IRQs. Lots of customers have the same problem with the Audigy on KR7A motherboards. Neither ABIT nor us have any viable solution for now ; it seems KR7A boards damage Audigy ones. We are currently working with ABIT to solve this problem; unfortunately, we
  haven't been able to reproduce it yet."
• KR7A(-RAID) only: One report that the combination of an older 3COM network interface card (NIC) and Audigy can result in problems, including damage to Audigy cards. Use of other NIC brands apparently resolves this problem. However, this is certainly not universally true: I have an Audigy, KR7A-RAID and 3COM 3C905C NIC with no problems at all and several users have emailed to say that they too have no problems with this combination.
• KG7(-RAID) only: There are several AMD761 chipset options that affect the behaviour of the PCI bus that ABIT have chosen not to make available to the user through the BIOS. Of particular interest here are PCI Delay Transaction, PCI Ordering Rules and Target Latency Rules. By default ABIT disable these three options, resulting in a PCI bus that is not fully PCI 2.2 compliant - although potentially marginally faster. By enabling these three options we can force the PCI bus to be fully PCI 2.2 compliant and this can help resolve crackling problems. As we cannot do this through the BIOS we must use WPCREDIT and WPCRSET to modify the registers from within Windows. These are available on the downloads page. You must modify two registers: 4C and 84. Using WPCREDIT, modify bits 1 and 2 of register 4C to be set (to 1) and bit 2 of register 84 to be set. Leave the other bits unchanged. In hex this means setting register 4C to 07h and 84 to 9Eh. WPCREDIT only makes this change until the next reboot. If this appears to resolve the crackling problem, then you may wish to make this a permanent change, in which case you need to use WPCRSET to modify these two registers automatically each time Windows boots.

Many of the same fixes apply to the KT7 series. For both my KT7A-Raid and KR7A-RAID motherboards a combination of the latest VIA drivers and version 0.19 of George’s Latency Patch fixed the problem.

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