Because of the recent fiasco with Creative / Daniel K the straw has broken the camels back and I am trying real hard to not use my X-Fi XtremeGamer, and never buy Creative again. Although I didn't personally have many issues with it (and Alchemy is great for Vista...wish there was one for everyone) I don't want to spend my life wondering what will happen next with my drivers..
I have a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R rev 1.0. This board has the Realtek ALC889A chip and when I first started using it in XP I was so very impressed with both the quality and the features. Specifically speaker fill. I love upmixing my music to 5.1 and at the time I was having weird issues with Creatives own expansion setting so I happily used my onboard for quite a while.
Then I decided to upgrade to Vista and noticed immediately that things were not working the way they had on XP.. DirectSound removal aside, I couldn't even get music to upmix properly.. So here I am again, trying to get by without my X-Fi and I've installed the latest drivers from Realtek's web site for Vista x64.
When I enable speaker fill, the rear speakers output sound at a pretty low level, but when you get up close to check them, it is clearly putting out distorted audio. The only way I can describe it is that the rear's sound like you are listening to low-bitrate audio from an Internet station, and seems to be concentrated at the high end of the freqency spectrum. I don't understand why it worked fine in XP x64, and it works ok in Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy as well. I don't even need to do anything special in Linux, I just adjust the individual channel levels to balance out the sound.. SO I'm not sure why it doesn't work that way on Windows; even still I am about to reinstall XP x64 today to verify it still works properly there.
I have tried drivers from my original gigabyte CD, and from their web site.. The installer runs but the sound doesn't work at all.. like the drivers don't work for the device.. (I'm sure it's nothing but Linux identifies my onboard as another model).
The only other thing I can think after playing with all the drivers is to possibly try Vista x32, so I am really at a loss about what to do here.. The only other thing I can add is that different MP3's play better than others, however they all play just fine in Linux so the problem can't be the files..
Has anyone else at least experienced this same problem? It would be good to know at least that much..
Thanks.
I have a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R rev 1.0. This board has the Realtek ALC889A chip and when I first started using it in XP I was so very impressed with both the quality and the features. Specifically speaker fill. I love upmixing my music to 5.1 and at the time I was having weird issues with Creatives own expansion setting so I happily used my onboard for quite a while.
Then I decided to upgrade to Vista and noticed immediately that things were not working the way they had on XP.. DirectSound removal aside, I couldn't even get music to upmix properly.. So here I am again, trying to get by without my X-Fi and I've installed the latest drivers from Realtek's web site for Vista x64.
When I enable speaker fill, the rear speakers output sound at a pretty low level, but when you get up close to check them, it is clearly putting out distorted audio. The only way I can describe it is that the rear's sound like you are listening to low-bitrate audio from an Internet station, and seems to be concentrated at the high end of the freqency spectrum. I don't understand why it worked fine in XP x64, and it works ok in Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy as well. I don't even need to do anything special in Linux, I just adjust the individual channel levels to balance out the sound.. SO I'm not sure why it doesn't work that way on Windows; even still I am about to reinstall XP x64 today to verify it still works properly there.
I have tried drivers from my original gigabyte CD, and from their web site.. The installer runs but the sound doesn't work at all.. like the drivers don't work for the device.. (I'm sure it's nothing but Linux identifies my onboard as another model).
The only other thing I can think after playing with all the drivers is to possibly try Vista x32, so I am really at a loss about what to do here.. The only other thing I can add is that different MP3's play better than others, however they all play just fine in Linux so the problem can't be the files..
Has anyone else at least experienced this same problem? It would be good to know at least that much..
Thanks.
.
