Tech Tip Articles

Someone was asking about the best speakers to get a few weeks back and then I ran into my own troubles with my new system.

In doing some research I discovered just how bad Creative Labs has gotten with their near monopoly in the Sound Card business with fights with nVidia and MS over Vista (most issues have been solveD) etc.

Long story short I thought it would be helpful to start a thread where people can get useful advice on problematic equipment.

In CL's case their cards and speakers are proprietary equipment so here's some instructions if you bought CL's 7.1 speakers and don't have a CL card:

http://problemstosolve.com/computers…d-card-solved/

Bottom line is that CL does not make their cards, and therefore the necessary cables, to proper 7.1 specifications.

By the way things going on now Creative Labs seems to had put less priority to their sound card and speaker business and instead focused on portable media players (Zen, Muvo). But this is just my superficial assesment based on vague memory of some articles i read somewhere, and comments by many dissatified users of Creative Labs sound cards drivers (mainly the driver problems, not the hardware). It's been years peoples complained about drivers, but with Windows Vista - there's even more stories of horror and of peoples pulling their hairs out…

However to be fair, they did released the Alchemy (the newest ver. 1.00.30) for Vista, and even in my case as an user of X-Fi XtremeGamer with Vista, the card works great since day one for my new rig in Crysis, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Orange Box's games, and Gears of War. Six channels direct sound, stereo, stereo x2, Dolby PLII Movie and Music functions work great on my Logitech speaker. But i'm still hesistating to install the newest ALchemy if you catched my drift here… You just don't mess with something that work fine so far. I had heard someone boot up PC and Windows goes berserks because the Windows auto update messed up the OS itself.

All in all i'd recommend all new buyers of sound card to look for Sound Blaster alternatives as there're alot out there now; e.g Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 (use same sound tech licensed from Creative, so its as sound good for games and movies). Its driver still associated with Creative driver in some ways but i think it's better - just check and follow online comments by users. I actually wanted to get one but difficult to find as it's very new couple months back.

I've still got a Realtek sound chip onboard, and right now that's enough for me.
I don't have any need for buying a new sound card right now.

the CL X-Fi does still pop (mostly clicks) on occasion when it get's loud our highs in spite of their driver fixes. Just a warning to all. ALchemy is definitely a Godsend. I don't know if I should stick to EAX or use directsound3d 7+ though?