Updated driver produces distorted line-in au

Question

I have an Audigy Z2, and it's worked fine for a long time. Occasionally I listen to radio or TV output through the PC headphones, via a stereo cable from the earphone output of the radio or TV to the line-in on the sound card. Quality's fine, and it coexists perfectly with game, video, or other sounds produced on the computer. Lately, trying to diagnose a CTD issue in a game, I updated the Audigy driver to one from October 2006 or so, the latest that Creative's site offers. Since then, when running a game using hardware sound, the line-in quality is severely distorted. I'm very disappointed by this, and I'm hoping you guys might have some ideas on what to do. I've repeatedly tried reinstalling the driver, performing a clean driver wipe and install, etc., and no go. Is this a problem with this driver? I have no competing sound drivers to my knowledge, and device manager doesn't show anything else besides the "Audio Codec" style entries which can't be disabled and don't seem like they would interfere. I've recorded a sample of this using audio from the weather channel. Right click, save, play. http://home.roadrunner.com/~jcrichman/sound_test.mp3?Around 3 seconds in, a game I started takes over the sound, or whatever it does, and you can hear the distortion start. The voice guy on the weather channel starts up at 3 seconds in, and you can really hear the distortion. At 38 seconds in or so, I've closed the game and you can hear the distortion go away. The remaining sound quality is perfectly normal; any remaining static or distortion is a result of either the weather channel audio or the sound quality of the mp3 file. Hopefully, you can hear that reverb-style distortion I'm referring to. Any ideas?For the record, I'm on Windows 2000 professional, I have 2 gb of RAM, in a 2.8ghz P4, with an ATI Radeon 9600. This problem is also not limited to the game. The one used for that sound test was Battlefield 2, but it happens pretty much on any game I can set to use Hardware sound.Message Edited by JBlitzen on 04-9-20070:27 AM

Answer 1

I've never had a setup like yours, but the problem does sound familiar. Maybe you could see what happens if you try disabling CMSS or CMSS2 in the Audio Console, just for curiosity's sake, though it probably won't help.
It definitely sounds like a driver issue from what you've said, and I'd try contacting support more directly if I were you, but good luck getting them to tell you anything but "we'll RMA it for you". And if they do offer a replacement, you should probably refuse unless you enjoy wasting time.
Wish I could be of more help.