TheOnlyWizard17

Yowh...
I'm new to this forum, but nevertheless, I've got the problem with my Creative Audigy Platinum Ex as so many others seem to have more or less... And that's the BSOD - Beep Sound Of Death ;-)... I've also got another problem, and that's the SPDIF output... It get's cut every 200 msecs or so...
My receiver really has a problem resyncing to the AC3-stream all of the time... Problem with my receiver ? No way, I don't think so, because it's a Japanese brand ;-)...

Anyway,
after reading everything I could find about the problem,
including the old thread http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12095
AND the new thread http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26491
and extensive searches on google and yahoo,
I've made a few conclusions of my own, and provide a POSSIBLE (!) solution to this problem and my other problem...

A warning up front though, this "solution" is not 100% in every case, and it's merely a patch on a hole in your tire,
it doesn't garantee it will be 100% airtight ;-) Also, it's pretty tricky to do, and not without any GREAT RISC !!!

First I want to make a few statements here...

Creative Company:
I guess we all know what kind of company Creative is...
They are masters in marketing and advertising, they suck bigtime in technology and support...
I mean, who puts the least quality DAC's on the front-channels and the better ones on the rear-channels so Eugene had to switch
front and rear-channels to fix that ?
They do, because they don't understand technology...
Who converts remote control signals into unneccessary MIDI-commands, so they conveniently get
recorded into your sequencer-program if you happen to want to use your remote to turn up the
volume a bit or so while recording ??? They do... What kind of bullshit is all this now ???
They really don't think...

They advertise these cards as GAMERS-cards, promise golden mountains, while in reality delivering
only heaps of sand... ;-) Well, maybe we really should consider the Creative products as
GAMERS-products, and turn our attention to alternatives...
Don't get me wrong here, the EMU-chip used here has awesome potential, no doubt about that...
But, unfortunately for us, it's in the wrong hands and on the wrong card !!!
There's not much we can do about that... (Except dropping Creative and buying ourselfs a much more
expensive REAL musicians-card !!!)


Creative Cards:
Adding on what I said about what makes these cards suck...
I'm talking about the whole series involving the EMU-chip, so from SB-Live all the way to
Audigy 2 !!! Most of the technology used is actually just the same, Creative just kept adding
a few new features or extended a few existing features with each new card...

I've read about and have actually seen it myself:
People literally blowing up their Audigy cards... People telling me that little by little, their card started
to sound distorted more and more, until it finally gave up and stopped making sound all together...
PEOPLE, be warned... You can and WILL blow up your card one day (immediately or little by little
over the years) if you have the sound TOO LOUD, especially for very low bass-frequencies !!!
Make a habit of setting your master-volume 1 or 2 knotches from MAX, and don't add excessive
bass by equalizing !!! If you do, lower the master-volume even more... That's my experience...
If possible, add bass and treble on your receiver/speakers, not in your card !!!
The way Creative implemented the DSP-effects is kinda in parallel...
With this I mean you have your original sound (ie. 0 dB max), add an effect and what happens ?
The original sound gets fed into the effect, and then ADDED to the original sound... So 0 dB of
sound gets added with, say, -2 dB of effectsound, which means your total output will be more
with effects then without !!! This of course very soon gives you the potential of overdriving
the master output, resulting in distortion/clipping or whatever you want to call it...
Well, putting a clipped sound through a DAC should, in theory, have no effect on the working
of the DAC... Well, that's theory, pratice showed me different... Maybe I'm completely wrong
here concerning the technical details or whatever, but fact remains, overdriving your card in
whatever way WILL cause your card to ceise functioning completely at one day...!!!
Nice thing about the kx Project drivers again: You can place the effects whereever you want, in
turn avoiding the above problem of "adding" effects...

Many people have small speakers which can't at all reproduce frequencies under 100 Hz or so...
For that matter, you might be overdriving your card without you ever noticing it !!!
Your card might be "trying" to produce alot of frequencies below 100 Hz and you don't hear
any difference at all... kx Project drivers again: There's a nice way to check this:
completely turn up the 32 Hz slider from the 10 band EQ and look and listen to your speakers...
Do they start to sound a little puffing ??? Trying to reproduce sounds they simply cannot ???
On many cheap speakersets, in that case, you will notice the power-LED starting to flash more
or less on the beat of the lower frequencies... Nice to see, but this is damaging your card and
speakers... ;-) The better your sound-system, the easier it will be to spot overdriving...
If you hear the slightest distortion or clipping or artifact, you are probably overdriving your card...
Check your master-volume, turn it down, check your bass-settings, EQ...
The best is to set your volume to half, and do NO equalizing at all !!! Of course, on most speaker-
systems, that will sound rather dull, so try to adjust on your speakers/amplifiers, but leave the
card just producing the "raw", "dull" sound !!! Rule of thumb: If you can turn the master-volume
to max., without any change in soundquality, then your doing good !!!
With kx Project drivers, your alternative would be to check the Peak-indicator... As long as it stays
below 0 dB your doing good... Check with different kinds of music though !!!

kx Project:
Eugene has done an asstoundingly great job into unlocking the best possible potential of the EMU-chip...
By eliminating all the unneccessary bulllshit which is there in Creative's own software, and by trying
to take the most direct paths available with the EMU-chip, he's been able to produce a driver with
the lowest possible latency for ASIO-recording... It even allows you to manually program your DSP,
and has many many other benefits not found in Creative drivers... So, like they are saying on their
homepage, it puts the user back in total control of his sound-card...
You have to admit, he deserves a big handclapping for that !!!
Congrats, Eugene, for doing such a tremendously difficult task bringing such a big sucking card
to such a high level that it's actually quite usefull for musicians after all !!!

Problem is though, even Eugene cannot make a bad card perform great without any compromise or
even without some glitches... Because Eugene took the most direct aproach available, any potential
hardware-problem (caused by Creative's magnificent engineers) will show itself earlier and more
clearly... Nothing Eugene can do about it... So, it's not a fault in driver-programming, it's not a fault
of the voice allocation scheme used, etc. All this is speculative reasoning because that's just the
RESULT, and you can rectify that with cycling through all the 32/64 voices... The REAL problem is
the CAUSE, the reason the driver got into an unexpected condition, which causes the beeping...
You want my opinion on that? It's because the driver gets fucked up because of hardware-timing problems...
And it's impossible to write a driver that can cope with every possible "miscondition" that can arise
from these timing-errors... The only thing you can do is to try to avoid PCI-timing problems...
I'll explain how I came to this a little later...

The driver rocks !!! As far as I'm concerned it could still use a few more features, most importantly a much
better much less complicated user-interface for people without technical experience, but the CORE is
nearly perfect and f**cking stable !!!

Creative Drivers:
Everybody is saying that the Creative drivers (whichever version) will NOT give you this beeping-problem, well, that's true !
BUT...It can give you other problems, which don't show so clearly, but nevertheless are things that shouldn't happen...
For example, with my creative drivers I cannot use the DSP at all without problems... "Dry" sound is okay (although sounds a little distorted), but whenever I use whatever DSP-effect, the DSP-effect sound sounds very distorted and garbled... When my system is
idle, it doesn't show that clearly, but when I copy a movie from one drive to another (thus high PCI-bus utilization) THEN it's so bad,
you almost don't hear anything usefull anymore except complete garbled sound... I bought this card for it's DSP mainly, and also because of it's SPDIF-out functionality... Which rocks... When it works that is... Because the same happens with that... If I play a movie with AC3-sound (which I reroute to SPDIF-out using AC3-filter) the signal stream to my DD-receiver gets cut off every 200 milliseconds or so...
That's ofcourse completely unacceptable performance...

Don't say Creative drivers don't have any problems... They do...
On the other hand, they've gone to a great extreme to try to hide these problems or to get rid of them,
even writing a complete device-driver to change the PCI-timings when windows starts...
Well, very nice, and it makes the card perform decently in most cases, but the fact it is slowing down
the rest of your system is something most people don't know/notice...

Well, I did...
Performance:
On my PCI-bus, there are quite alot devices:
- a SCSI-card
- a build in RAID controller
- 1 3com network controller
- 1 build in Intel PRO/1000 network controller
- a IEEE 1394 controller
- several USB 1.0/2.0-controllers

I tried a few benchmarks, just for fun...

- without Creative Audigy card installed,
my system runs at peak performance,
which of course can be measured best with the SCSI and RAID controllers...
My HDD benchmarks are top of the bill, copying a 700 Mb movie in less than a minute...! ;-)

- WITH the Creative card (in whatever PCI-slot, I might add),
but without any drivers installed, there's no difference in performance (as expected)...

- WITH the Creative card, AND Creative drivers,
my system is noticably slower...
That's why I started benchmarking, only to find out
that my HDD's are running about 25-30% slower !!!
Well, if my drives are running slower, than my network cards
and EVERYTHING else on the PCI-bus will be running slower of course too !!!
Whatever it is that Creative is changing in the PCI-timings, it's
no good for the rest !!!

- WITH the Creative card, AND the kx Project drivers,
my system is back at top-performance !!!
This, of course, is quite logical, because Eugene doesn't
change any PCI-timings like Creative does...

Nevertheless, I've got problems with both drivers...
Creative gives me garbled/distorted sound when I access my harddrives, and cuts my SPDIF output,
the kx Project solves the garbled sound (thanx Eugene) but leaves me with the SPDIF output problem...
I've never found anyone writing about this problem, seems I'm the first one experiencing it ??? Please
lt me know I'm not alone here ... ;-)

Anyway, I've tried all the usual stuff, including everything usefull mentioned in both these threads...
Nothing helps...

Eugene, I think the problem is more like this:
The problem is in part the cards themselfs, because they are known to completely clogg up your PCI-bus with pointless null-bytes, even when the card is idle... Secondly, modern motherboards have "out of specification" timings, also with the PCI-bus... Many motherboard-manufacturers deliberately let the whole motherboard run "out of spec", because of pressure to be the fastest of all the competition, and because everything nowadays simply IS so f**cking fast, like FSB800 and so, requiring exact timings on every component... That's why there are so many problems with modern boards nowadays, while there were far less problems in the old days...

Anyway, I found a possible solution to cure both... But it's not a cure without risc !

I think the problems are caused by inacurate PCI-bus timings... Seems the Creative card requires a very specific PCI-bus config. in order to
work without problems... PCI latency, PCI delayed transaction, or whatever the names of those parameters are, don't change a thing...
Upgrading your BIOS MIGHT work, because alot of manufacturers ease up on the timings in later BIOS releases, because the contest of being
the fastest already has shifted to other newer boards anyway, and now COMPATIBILITY is becoming a more popular issue, demanded mostly
by the disappointed public who believed the promised golden mountains...

(Continued in the next post)

TheOnlyWizard17

I'll try to explain this as simple as possible, so even readers without computer knowledge can understand the problem here:
Imagine there are a hundred delivery-companies, all competing to use the same roads to transport their products to their customers
in the fastest time possible...
They all get stuck on a imaginairy "Y"-crossing... The roads leading to the crossing all have a speed-limit of 80 Km/hour...
On top of that, on the crossing itself are traffic-lights, allowing only 10 trucks to pass each time... (PCI latency)
All trucks are traveling from the top two roads down and come together after the traffic-lights on the bottom road (Imagine the "Y" again here)...
Now, with a speed-limit of 80 Km./h and the traffic-lights allowing only 10 trucks to pass each time, they ALL cannot deliver on time !!!
Most customers are not that picky and can simply wait that little longer... But some customers (and the Creative card is one such a customer)
CANNOT wait any longer than the promised delivery-time and will start complaining !!!
With no other roads available, what can you do about it ??? Change the traffic-light timing (PCI latency) so, for example, 50 trucks can pass each time???
No, that doesn't work, because all the trucks are still stuck in the traffic-jam !!!

Creatives solution now is to slow down the delivery-times of ALL companies, so no customer will start complaining and their company (Creative card)
can do their business to full satisfactory of their customers too...
Of course, in my opinin, that's not a solution...
Many buyers of a fast motherboard don't want to see theit overall performance dragged down just to allow their sound card to perform decently...
That's cheating !!!
One solution could be to expend the roads with more lanes, but since PCI is PCI, and untill Creative will start making cards for the
PCIExpress-bus or so, that's not an available solution either...

The one and only available trick here would be to raise the max. allowed speed, say, from 80 Km./h to 120 Km./h...
That way, traffic-flow will be faster all together, and the traffic-jam will dissolve...

Of course, I'm talking about overclocking your PCI-bus...
Problem is, ONLY certain modern motherboards allow you to do this without overclocking everything else...

The most common parameter for this is the AGP/PCI/SRC clk setting...

By overclocking your PCI-bus slightly, you dissolve the traffic-jam, everybody can deliver in time and so your Creative card will
perform without problems too !

Downside, of course, is the potential risc of overclocking too much (which would stop your PC from functioning at all), or, for example
corrupt the information on your harddrives, because the controller cannot keep up anymore...

WARNING:
Before you start trying to do this immidiately you REALLY have to read the next paragraph to be aware of the possible dangers...
MOST HD controllers, mostly SCSI-controllers and especially RAID- or SATA-controllers (found on most modern motherboards) REALLY rely
on perfect timing settings, and overclocking those timings will severely impair their ability to function, resulting in data-loss and
corruption of your HD's !!! Most BIOS'es warn for that too... It's not for nothing !!!

So, what you should do is this:
- First, make sure you know how to get back into your BIOS in case your PC stops completely (not even showing the BIOS screen anymore at startup)...
Some allow you to get into the BIOS (and reset it to defaults) by pressing a certain key while booting (mostly F1 or F2 or INS)...
Most of the time, taking out the power-cord and Battery on the motherboard, waiting 30 seconds, then putting everything back will cause your
BIOS to be reset too...

- Secondly, disconnect ANY and ALL HD's with important data !!! Failure to do so can damage your precious data if you proceed with this !!!
Prefereably, take only one drive with useless bullshit on it (scratch-drive) to test with...
Of course, you will need your boot-drive...
All this is true for any drive connected to SCSI-cards, RAID- / SATA- cards/controllers, IDE-controllers, etc., except for the onboard IDE-controller,
because that one operates independantly of the PCI-bus (In modern motherboards)...
If you boot from the onboard IDE-controllers, then just use only one scratch-drive on the SCSI/RAID/SATA-controller to test with...

- Don't worry about your network-cards, USB, 1394 controllers and so, unless you will actively use them while doing this procedure
(which is stupid and unnecessary)...

- Don't take out any cards because your test-results won't be valid anymore... You might just take out the card that won't
stand you PCI-bus overclocking, giving problems later on when you put it back !!!

- Now go into your BIOS and GRADUALLY increase your PCI-bus frequency one step at a time...
With every step, reboot and check if your system boots okay...
Next, extensively test your scrath-drive to see if corruption occurs or any errors are logged in the
event-viewer... (For example, my RAID-controller will start complaining that my RAID-BIOS is old and
my driver is instable and reduced performance will result)
If you don't get any problems (and no automatic checkdsk's at the next reboot) then check
if you can reproduce any problem with your Creative card...
Test to see if the problem is gone... If not, increase one more step...

If you do it like this, you have almost no risc, and you are effectively "tuning" your PCI-bus for
maximum performance without "overdoing" it, causing problems with all the other devices...

For me, in my case, I've overclocked the PCI-bus to 43 Mhz... (normal is 33 Mhz)...

Because this setting is still a combined setting (AGP/PCI/SRC) it will also increase overclock
your AGP-bus at the same time... Most modern video-cards can stand a little tweaking so that
won't be too big a problem I believe... If you see strange things happening on your screen,
you've gone too far... But in that case your system won't boot already anymore already anyway...
Then follow the "BIOS revive"-procedure described above...

Also, you're also overclocking your Source-clock... On some motherboards, that's a very bad
thing to do, because your memory-timings depend on that clock... In that case your also
verclocking your memory and most "normal" memory modules don't have that much timing-
headroom to play with...

On most modern motherboards, you can also choose to get the memory-timing from your CPU-clk
OR from your SRC-clk... In that case, choose your CPU-clock (which we don't change) !!!

If you succeed in overclocking your PCI-bus JUST enough so your Creative card functions properly,
you've done well and you can enjoy the best of your Card with Eugene's kx Project Drivers !!!

I had the beeping at least once a week (and the SPDIF problem always)...
Now, in more than one year time I recently had the beeping only ONCE !!!
And all that time I enjoyed my AC3-movies without any interruptions...!!!
So, to get back to my delivery-company example, crashes and traffic-jams still
occur, but the probability of getting one are reduced 100 fold !!!

So, it does work !!! But, I admit, it's not a real solution...
The only REAL solution can come from Creative or yourself...
When Creative stops making bullshit and producing GOOD cards, or when you simply decide
to stop using and buying Creative products and move on to alternatives...

Well, that's about it I think...
It worked for me at least, so at least I didn't waste my money on a useless product (just because I upgraded my motherboard)...

I would like to thank all the people writing their suggestions and idea's about this problem, all the given possible solutions
and of course, many, many thanks to Eugene for creating the best drivers for this "piece of crap"-card... LOL
Thanx to him and a little PCI-tricking, I can still enjoy it at least....

On more thing...
As you can see (from the length) I was pretty much fed up with this whole thing, and decided to share all
this stuff with ya all, but I normally don't visit forums and stuff like that that often...
If you would like to contact me for whatever reason, feel free to do so, but then mail me directly...
Replying this forum will probably not get you very far as I won't be checking it very often...

Grtz,
Bart van de Beek