Good evening, I seem to suddenly have a problem with my Creative X-Fi gamer card. Whenever I load up a game (namely Assassins creed, CoD4 and Hitman Blood money) the sound becomes distorted, fuzzy and generally quieter than it should be. This is resolved by going into the console launcher for the soundcard drivers, and resetting everything to default. This then stops me from being able to customise any settings in the cound console, because everytime i have to reset it all. I have tried turning on and off each setting individually when it happens to see if it could be one of them but it doesn't go away until I click 'reset to default'. I've tried uninstalling all of the creative drivers and reinstalling them, and also updating everything, but nothing seems to work. The sound card and speakers have been fine for a year or so, and it has suddenly happened for the last week. Any help would be much appreciated! Sam.
When did you make the switch? There are major compatibility issues with Vista and X-Fi drivers I believe.
I've had vista for a long time without problem, It's literally started happening in the last week, and i haven't changed anything hardware or software wise. Edit: If i use the built in audio, it's fine. However the creative card, when working, makes it sound so much better.
I get that, too, even just using Media Player. A reset seems to have cured it. Have you installed/uninstalled the OpenAL drivers? Might be something to do with them.
Welcome to the club! If you go to Creative forum, you will see you are not alone. Over 2 000 thread has been posted with this bug, and Creative keeps banning people by IP and delete these threads. Your problem also occurs in WinXP. The Creative X-Fi card itself doesn't like: - New Intel chipsets - Nforce 4 mobos, some Nforce 5 - Really New ATI/AMD motherboard chipsets - Crossfire - SLI Creative denies the issues and blame the chipset maker. And of course, we all know who is really wrong. They are also a numerous problem with Skype. If you start skype do a conversation and close it, in Vista no more sound can be output, and under XP you can get a BSOD. The only solution, is to change your sound card. They are MUCH better sound cards out there. I am planning to change mine as well. I was having sever problem under XP, I thought it would be resolved under Vista, but no. I am like you. This summer if budget allows, I'll get the currently best playback sound card, the ASUS Xonar. Nearly all review (everyone except bit-tech (just because of some UI panel picture problem (that's not even a valid reason to remove anything more then a quarter mark, but anyway)) sites gives it at 9.5 to 10/10.
Looks like i might go back to the built in audio for now then, it just seems wierd that for almost a year it was absolutely fine?
Yeah, I thought it wierd too. Even when I had an N-Force4 mobo, it worked fine (although it was up to Asus/DFI/Abit et al to release a bios that let the x-fi work properly lol, it was to do with the amount of x-ram on the card itself and the way the nforce4 chipset saw it). I'm now on an Intel P35 mobo. It just seems a bit random if/when it does it, too. It's not happened for a little while to me now, but it got a little more regular at one point, and it's noticeable straight away as it sounds like its trying to pump sub frequencies through the front speakers and ends up sounding like the bass has turned to max and distorts everything. Note, I have recently shifted to Vista64 from Vista32. I can't say I ever noticed it in XP.
