HELP.... crackly sound! (Vista)

hayaku on 12/9/2007 at 06:25

Yes you may remember me from other such Vista based DX help threads as "HELP... does this game run inDirect 3d?" and [###N/A! data not found].

Ok, when I play the game I sometimes get this horribly corrupted sound... its crackly, it pops, it gets distorted. Its also pretty random, seems to come and go. Most often a new sound being played will trigger it, where upon it will last for 10-30ish seconds then go away, usually when yet another new sound is played or I leave the area from which the original triggering sound was sourced.

Interestingly, sometimes I will load up a game and play for hours without ever encountering it, other times I get it constantly thought until I exit and load the game up again.

But yeah, I have tried two separate sound cards and one on board sound chip and all three gave me the same results... I am wondering if its a Vista thing or what. Flicking between sound frequency, 8-16 bit, reverse stereo, hardware 3D and all the other sound options dont really ever change anything, often I think it has solved the problem only to encounter it later... as I said it comes and goes pretty sporadically, often leaving me alone for entire sessions.

Anyone know about known DX sound issues or what might fix them?

massivley appreciated!

Jeshibu on 12/9/2007 at 08:53

In XP, this sort of thing can usually be fixed by lowering the hardware acceleration setting in Control Panel>Sound/Audio>Advanced speaker settings>Performance. No idea how that works in Vista though.

What audio driver are you using?

hayaku on 12/9/2007 at 13:03

Hmmmmmm.... couldn't find anything like that in Vista. Ill keep checking it out. Vista's control panel and user settings are fairly chaotic by definition, wouldn't surprise me if its not even there!!

Audio drivers? Creative SB X-Fi 6.0.1.1302 for the sound card, Realtek High Definition Audio 6.0.1.5334 for the onboard. Sound card #2 is an ancient Audigy 2 thats back where it belongs in my brothers computer :p

thanks though. Anybody else have any advice??

Jeshibu on 12/9/2007 at 22:31

Why are you using two audio drivers? Shouldn't you disable the onboard audio card?

hayaku on 13/9/2007 at 02:38

Normally I do disable it, however its in use right now for diagnostic purposes!!
Anyway, just found something that could be the problem. One for the sound nuts out there.

bellow is a screenshot of some menu's I found somewhere in control panel. Note the following...

(http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/6444/menuoa6.jpg) http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/6444/menuoa6.jpg

* Disable Sound Blaster enhancements (unchecked default)

* 24-bit, 48000Hz (Studio quality) (this is set this way as default) I will try it on 24-bit 44100Hz and maybe even 16-bit 44100 too)

* Allow applications to take exlusive control of this device (checked by default)
* Give exclusive mode applications priority (As above!!)

Anyone know what these mean or which might be responsible for my shoddy sound? So far the low hanging fruit is setting frequency from 48000 to 44100, as 44100 is the highest DX does and maybe never anticipated the quality and definition that this current generation of sound cards was working with...

Not sure about 24 vs 16 bit, im thinking it shouldn't make a difference but we will have to just wait and see.

negativeliberty on 19/9/2007 at 16:27

Go to dxdiag's sound tab and turn Hardware Sound Acceleration Level down a tad (and again until the problem disappears).

Chuck on 30/9/2007 at 18:10

But Vista Doesn't have that setting! I've been struggling with this problem too, and have yet to find a simple answer.

Best thing to do is to save (or purchase) and old system to run XP games.

NoMis on 1/10/2007 at 08:07

MS changed DirectSound in Vista to not allow Hardware Access anymore. Thats why you wont find the setting in Vista. DirectSound is now completly software based.

This also means that games using DirectSound 3D wont have EAX support in Vista. Some games even fall back to stereo sound if they don't detect EAX. OpenAL Games don't have this problem.

You could try (http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx) Alchemy to enable Hardware support. Maybe it solves the problem. At least I never had crackling sound since I used alchemy, but I can't tell if it actually solved the problem since the problem occours randomly.

You just need to copy dsound.ini and dsound.dll from your alchemy folder to your Deus Ex system folder. It works with the default configuration for me.

NoMis

Chuck on 4/10/2007 at 19:21

I fixed my DX distortion this morning by turning off 1 core. This also worked
for both Thief and SS2 (freezing issues).