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Unanswered Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 and X-FI Crackling problems

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      Thursday, April 17, 2008 2:14 AM
       
       
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      Hi, I figured I post this here since this is related to the public available release of Vista SP1 for Vista Ultimate x64. After installing SP1 from Windows Update, I began to experience poor audio quality, crackling, buzzing, etc with my Creative X-FI ExtremeMusic sound card. I read up that some drivers need to be reinstalled by uninstall, reboot, reinstall. Well, that method generally solves it for a few days, but it definately comes back. Now, if I disable the device in device manager, reboot, and then reenable, the crackling goes away. Is there anyway to solve this problem permanently other than having to do several additional steps to bring the sound back up to par?

      Thanks.
       

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    • Saturday, April 19, 2008 8:58 PM
       
       
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      Hi,

       

      I have discovered the same thing as you.  I have a Dell XPS 710 H2C with Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition SP1, and my sound card is an X-Fi ExtremeMusic (drivers: 2.15.0006).  DVDs played in whatever player I use, whether Media Player Classic or Nero ShowTime, start to exhibit crackling noises and other audio distortion after a while, maybe 5-10 minutes into a movie.  Similarly, CDs played on iTunes while importing them have crackling sounds after a few minutes, but the crackling stops completely when the importing has finished and the music is being played from my HD instead of an optical drive.

       

      I wonder if there is some problem with the way that resources are being allocated when media is being played from optical discs.  I never had this problem when I was using Windows XP Professional SP2.  I didn't install Ultimate until after SP1 was released, so I do not know whether this is a problem relating to SP1 or not.

       

      I haven't tried it, but perhaps a DVD copied to the hard disk via a tool such as DVDFab or DVD Cloner and then played from the HD will avoid the audio distortion?  Clearly not a satisfactory workaround...

       

       

      -=W=-

       

       
    • Saturday, April 19, 2008 10:25 PM
       
       
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      Hi,

       

      Just as an update. I have opened a support ticket with MS to see if this problem can be further looked into. I am using the same driver version as WarFlail and are the latest on Creative's website (2.15.0006). However, the crackling happens whether the media is accessed from the DVD drive or hard drive. I hope a solution can be found soon. I will update this thread if there are any further updates.

       

      Just if anyone is wondering, my system setup is:

       

      ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe

      MSI GeForce 7950 GX2

      4GB corsair memory

      1 AMD X2 Dual-core CPU 4800+

      2 500GB WD hard drives

      2 dvd drives (rw and rom)

      Creative X-FI ExtremeMusic

       

      -vtcool

       

       
    • Monday, April 21, 2008 2:52 PM
       
       
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      Here is my sound card Sound Card – Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty ™ FPS with 64MB x-Ram, i also runnign my system in Vista Ultimate X64 but I don't experence any error about the sound issue, however my CPU usage and Hard Disc non-stop spinnign like hell, try to un-stall SP1 and see the sound is still on... My current sound driver is 6.0.1.1302 by Creative X-Fi Audio Processor (WDM)

       

      Please also see link in below...

       

      http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3193858&SiteID=17

       
    • Thursday, April 24, 2008 10:23 AM
       
       
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      me too, I have exactly the same problem. After installing SP! on my ultimate 64bit, my x-fi fatalaty became unusable... (((
      Crackling sounds and chirping just like everybody has here... So here's what I did: I tried uninstalling SP!... but first disabled the sound card, uninstalled the drivers. After removal of SP! was completed, I restarted and installed the newest (006) march drivers for x-fi. I have uninterrupted sound now. I went in to the control panel and enable the usuals in creative audio console -> crystalazier, cmss, eax to max... pressed ok and back to the drawing board... sound is messed up again. So you see, the problem is not with SP1 (although maybe a clean install of vista would help, not just unstalling SP!). So I went to the sound properties again and ticked off the "enable sound blaster enchancements'. The sounds works great now, but obviously without any creative candy... It's hard to pin point who's problem it is, Microsoft's or Creative... but knowing how Creative treats it's customers lately, I can easily imagine that someone in the company didn't do their job... (((
      we need a fix desperately!!!
       
    • Friday, April 25, 2008 12:53 AM
       
       
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      Thanks Mike. I just tried the selection of "Disable Sound Blaster Enhancements" checkbox and after rebooting a few times to see if the crackle is around again, it seems to have went away. However, I never had to select this checkbox when running without SP1. Music definately sound more dull than before. However, I'll send an update to the MS support rep that is dealing with my issue this information. Hopefully, we can get a fix for this. Otherwise, I can always install the new soundcard I bought that doesn't utilize the X-Fi chipset. But, I agree, we need a fix for this issue.

      Edit:

      While this may have slimmed the chances of getting the crackle. It seems I spoken too soon and that after turning off the machine last night and booting it again today, the crackle did occur again. This is even with the "Disable SoundBlaster Enhancements" selection on. So, unfortunately, it was too good to be true for me. May work for other people though.

       
    • Tuesday, April 29, 2008 1:37 PM
       
       
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      It looks like the problem is solved!!!! Who would've thought... out of all the things in the world, the cause of all of my problems was the windows sidebar.... Here's what I did:
      1. ***probably irrelevant: Tweaked advanced timings on my ram (running 1100mhz at 4-4-4-12, so I set tRC to 16 and tRFC to 32)
      2. Next I played with all of my open applications (closed them all and opened one by one) and found out that only when sidebar is open, i start getting the crackling noise...
      3. So lastly, I removed creative driver (along with audio console), rebooted and reinstalled the 0006 drivers (march release).

      Now I'm able to use all of the x-fi enhancements and sound works flawlessly in any application.


      P.S. I should also mention that in my attempt to pin point the exact reason, I tried different branded RAM, GPU and even switched to onboard sound (Supreme FxII... which actually worked right away but of course it is far less superior to x-fi). Oh and of course I tried uninstalling SP1 and then re-installing it again. Unfortunately this solution might apply only to me, but I'd like to hear out anybody for whom it was helpful. ))))

       
    • Tuesday, April 29, 2008 11:02 PM
       
       
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      Congrats on fixing the issue . However, for me, I got pretty fed up with the crackle, I installed the other sound card I bought (BlueGears B-Enspirer). It does not run the X-FI chipset and sound is crystal clear. Quite unfortunate that nothing MS support suggested, nor my attempts could resolve this permanently. Unfortunately, this option may not be the best option for others since it requires purchasing another card, but it's an end all solution for the crackle problem.
       
    • Thursday, May 08, 2008 4:26 AM
       
       
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      I'm using Vista 32bit version but was having the same problems. I later discovered most of the sound distortion, clicks, and pops were coming from one setting. Turn of the SVM (Smart Volume Management) and I'm pretty sure most of your troubles will instantly vanish. Creative has been putting out some pretty horrible drivers, even for XP. Not sure I'll be buying Creative products in the near future.
       
    • Friday, June 27, 2008 6:47 PM
       
       
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      I run Vista Premium 64-bit SP1 and had a lot of issues with my X-Fi crackling and popping.

       

      I tried everything I could find based on searches about the crackle pop issue on Microsoft Vista x64 and Creative X-fi related forums etc and nothing seemed to work.

       

      Eventually the thing that did work (Well for me) was to simply leave the X-Fi drivers installed and uninstalled my Graphics Card (An XFX 9800 gx2). I then rebooted and allowed Windows to re-detect and install the graphics card.

       

      The crackle/pop stopped.

       

      It MAY of been an issue to do with resource allocation. I'm no wiz by any stretch of the imagination but it did work and I've had no issues since.

       

      Hope it works for whoever tries.

       

       

       
    • Wednesday, July 09, 2008 7:03 AM
       
       
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      Interesting, PanicMerchant,

       

      Uninstalling the NVIDIA drivers on my GeForce 8800GTX, rebooting and then letting Windows Vista x64 install the graphics card helped somewhat, but I had to go an additional step by uninstalling everything from 'Creative' in the program list as well, then rebooting.  I also uninstalled the audio drivers in the Device Manager and upon rebooting got Vista to install its own drivers.  The audio appears to be working fine now, with no crackling or distortion.

       

      But it means I have no Sound Blaster enhancements in my audio playback properties now.  Not sure what difference that was making.  I have no audio console now, either.  Not that CMSS or the Crystalizer were working anyway.

       

      Something else that has helped was to remove ALchemy, which caused crackling in games such as Shadowgrounds Survivor.

       

      The X-Fi and Vista don't seem to get on too well.  First this audio distortion problem and then I discover that my 3.5mm microphone doesn't get detected (I get around this by using a USB mic).  Hopefully the issues will be resolved over time by software updates.

       

      -=W=-

       

       
    • Tuesday, September 30, 2008 11:55 PM
       
       
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      Hi All,

       

      First of all I can't beleive how many Bad sugestions I've read/tried ... I've spent days, weeks, months... and still popping and crackling...  I finally fixed the problem with the Crackling SB X-fi and Vista 64.

       

      I read a blog containing info from creative explaining how a sound card works: 

      Here is the whole blog. http://xfi.blogspot.com/2006/05/crackling-and-popping-x-fi.html

       

      Below is the paragraph that made me think!

       

      "X-Fi is sharing memory access with high-end graphics and/or hard drives. We have found that with certain high-end systems and configurations, Sound Blaster X-Fi is being held off from receiving data from the PCI bus for significant periods of time, in some cases for close to two-thirds of a millisecond. This causes our audio buffers to underflow, which produces crackling sounds. "

       

      After looking in my device manager, I found that my Nvidia 8800 GTX and my SB X-fi extream music were sharing the same IRQ. Since my Dell XPS 710 Cmos has no way of selecting the IRQ, I was at a loss. I uninstalled my sound card many times and still the same IRQ#. I decided to removed all Nvidia drivers, Including Ntune.

      I then went into Device manager and uninstalled my video card. Hoping the OS would assign a different IRQ to the video card.

      After reboot ... the sound brought a tear to my eye.  It all works great.

      After checking my device manager the OS put my Agiea psysics card and my 8800 GTX on the same IRQ with the X-fi on it's own IRQ.

       

      If you can change the cmos IRQ assignment on your computer then you can assign X-fi its own IRQ.

       

      If not try switching the X-fi location on your mobo to a different pci slot.

       

      I really hope this helps.