As far as I can tell everthing seems to work fine with full hardware acceleration. I don't get any skipping, crackling or delayed sound, eax appears to work.
 
Mp3's and games all sound fine.
 
PC Spec
 
Win2k Pro 2195 (ACPI Multiprocessor)
Dual P3 500
Gigabyte GA-6BXD
128MB 100mhz DIMM
10GB HD
Creative TNT2 Ultra (5.22)
SBLive Value
Creative DXR3
Creative 6X DVD
HP 7200i CDRW
Hauppage WinTV
PCI Ethernet NC

Hrrm, replace the 500 dollar mother board or the 150 dollar sound card...
 
There is *nothing* wrong with my board... the system runs flawlessly in win 98, and flawlessly in win2k with the drivers included on the win2k cd. I haven't seen another person with my same motherboard with these problems, but there are alot of people with the same exact issues on other boards. Creative writes piss poor drivers, thats all there is to it, and if I'm going to replace anything its not gonna be my MB its going to be the SBLive. Saying I should replace my MB is asinine... judging from the poll on creative's newsgroup I could pick 50 percent of the SMP-capable motherboards and still have the exact same problems.
 
Ning

I see people still having problems because of ACPI... If ACPI is turned on then the PCI and other devices are sharing resources which is making SBlive go crazy. Do you notice that your sound card burps and pops when other kinds of I/O are happenning? Remember, the Video card, PCI network card, etc are all I/O. Gluck.

it's not ACPI causing my problems..... i'm sure because it didn't work with standard mode too
 
I don't get crackling ar anything.... my problem is that any 3d-sound effects seem to be at full volume. Because it is so loud, it also distorts a little. I've been diggin through the registry trying to find a key that controls the volume, thinking that the mixer isn't handling it right. All volume controls work okay, but anything that uses 3d-sound is much louder than everything else.
 
For instance, in UT firing the gun, which doesn't use positional sound, is at normal volume. the ricochet (sp?) of the bullet off the wall, which is 3d positioned, is about twice as loud. Turn 3d-sound off, and everything is the same volume......
 
annoying to say the least........

Personally, I'm utterly convinced that the snap/crackle is a hardware resource problem. It appears to only happen in Win2k, only with certain motherboards, and only in certain configs. I had the problem with my K6-450 system before and now I've upgraded to and entirely new Athlon 750 and the problem just went away. I did have another problem with the sound system at first though. It appears that my Live card has really short leads and small differences in the heighth of my new board caused the card to appear and disappear from the device list at will. Also, I had to force the board to change the Live's resources as it refused to set them itself. Creative's version of PnP, I suppose.
Finally, after propping the motherboard up with some washers, I finally got the sound card to stop appearing and disappearing. But now I have another problem with it. It now seems to lock up my machine with a short looping sound if I play games. It doesn't ever happen during normal operations. I tried replacing with a different card, but it still does the same thing.
I now have a ASUS K7V motherboard (memory at 100mhz) and I wonder if anyone else has had similar problems with the board. I've tried changing from ACPI to normal and it doesn't make any difference.
Thanks for any help.

I agree with Ningauble. Im sure if I put any other soundcard with decent win2000 support in my machine, I wouldnt have the problems im having today with my sblive. Soundcards are a damn cheap accesory to a pc compared to a system mainboard or scsi card, you would want to be insane to replace a motherboard/scsi card(unless it was a el cheapo' scsi card) to get a soundcard to work. And problems with sharing irq's and resources, everything else seems to work fine..apart from sblive. It seems that creative need to write better drivers or next time around im taking my business elsewhere, because theres no way im putting up with this bulls*** again.

I've got an A7v as well and I am having the same problems as everyone here. I too believe that Creative blows at writing drivers. If anybody comes up with a magic fix, for God's sake let me know because this snapping, popping and crashing has got to stop. Kinda sounds like a demonic version of rice crispies huh?

i have a fic mobo with via mvp3 chipset. and i have and always have had these problems. i had the crackling with liveware for win2k and w/ liveware3. i think it's my mobo though because i have talked with many ppl with problems with this mobo.

Hi,
 
Any one tried to change MPS version to 1.1 from 1.4? As far as know MPS 1.4 open virtual IRQ`s to system which is basicly shared hardware irq`s...
 
By the way, any one heard that Tyan just dumped "Thunder 2400" series and replaced it with 2500? (Which I`m using now.)
 
2400 owners must feel sadness..

I was just recently getting crackling noise with my SBL under W2k. I reinstalled DX and it corrected the problem. FYI: I installed DX8 146 which is the most recent build. I never remember having a problem with DX 7a. Hope this helps.

I was just recently getting crackling noise/leaking with my SBL under W2k. I reinstalled DX and it corrected the problem. FYI: I installed DX8 146 which is the most recent build. I never remember having a problem with DX 7a. Hope this helps.

a) ACPI is NOT the problem with regards to SBLive screw ups. The sharing of IRQs under ACPI is intentional and should never cause any problems unless you are using some EXTREMELY old and obscure bit of hardware in one of your PCI slots (read some of the technical documents on it if you disagree - you'll find loads on the subject in the Microsoft Knowledge Base). It doesn't matter whether or not ACPI is enabled, if the sblive doesn't like your system, it doesn't like it.
 
MP3s skipping: I'm just wondering whether the people who have reported their MP3s skipping are using the waveOut or DirectSound output plug-in (Winamp users only). Cos on my machine, DirectSound skips quite badly, but waveOut is just fine.
 
--
Xiven

Quote:Originally posted by Xiven:
a) ACPI is NOT the problem with regards to SBLive screw ups. The sharing of IRQs under ACPI is intentional and should never cause any problems unless you are using some EXTREMELY old and obscure bit of hardware in one of your PCI slots (read some of the technical documents on it if you disagree - you'll find loads on the subject in the Microsoft Knowledge Base).


"Should" is the operative word here. It seems that the SB Live doesn't play well with other PCI cards on the same IRQ, despite the fact that it's *supposed to* because it's a PCI 2.1 card. If it works at all, it can be very unstable (especially when combined with a GeForce) and can completely kill performance. My framerate drops from 45 to 5-15 in Unreal Tournament when I enable ACPI and EAX and someone fires a weapon, and this performance loss is apparently due to IRQ sharing. (It runs fine when EAX is disabled and/or when ACPI is disabled, and when I disable ACPI and put my GeForce and SB Live on the same IRQ on purpose I get the same performance loss.)

Incidentally, from reading the CL newsgroup posts, it seems that their attitude towards these issues is to build your computer around their sound card rather than them fixing the problems. If their sound card doesn't work right with ACPI's IRQ sharing, then they want you to disable ACPI. (Same goes for MVP3 chipsets, SMP, EAX problems, etc.) This is a load of garbage -- if their product doesn't work right with the rest of my computer (which incidentally is a pretty vanilla Athlon box, no SCSI or anything remotely unusual in there), then the answer is _not_ to disable or replace my computer's components! Sheesh.