Problems with ASIO on multiple Audigy 2 ZS cards

Question

G'day,
I've been using an Audigy 2ZS PCI for a couple of years now with great success. I convert old audio recordings to various digital formats using a couple of applications (mainly Adobe Audition 1.5 & 2.0).
Recently, my workload has increased to the point where I needed one card to just record at high res, and another card to handle just playback and general Windows bells & whistles without impacting the performance of the recording.
I installed a second 2ZS, it was detected by Windows, etc, and I set it up so Windows uses one card (identified as A800) for all its stuff, and the second card (B000) is used only for ASIO recording.
That's where the nightmare started. I've uploaded and installed the May 2006 Creative driver update, but I still suffer from a number of problems, some related to Audition, some not.
The least annoying problem is that all the Creative drivers seem to identify only a truncated version of the ID string. So for example, in various applications, I see "SB Audigy 2ZS [B0 -1" or "SB Audigy 2ZS [A8 -5". This is annoying but not showstopping.
The biggest problem is getting applications to correctly interact with the Creative Labs ASIO driver and enumerator. Most applications (Nero, Audition, Premiere Pro) can "see" the ASIO driver, but when it's selected, it may not work at all, or may work from one or the other sound card, without any clear indication of which card is selected.
I'm sorry if this sounds generic, but I've spent a week with the Adobe folks, who simply ended up telling me "it's a problem with the CL drivers", and most forums I frequent say the same thing, and the specifics vary from application to application, but at the core, CL drivers are just not working properly with the system when two cards are installed.
By way of example, using ASIO4ALL has fixed many of the card selection problems, but even there, sometimes the inputs of one card are disabled, sometimes the other card, and in the middle of a recording session (line in jack, 44.1k/16 bit), the input waveform slowly biases down to -2V and then all I get are inverted samples - quiet appears as max. value samples, while valid audio appears as -2V samples! If I put the audio line into the other card, it plays just fine (I know what I'm doing WRT grounding and line levels, etc).
This system has run essentially non-stop since September 2005, and I guess it collected a lot of software crud, so I bit the bullet and performed a clean reinstall of Windows XP and updated every driver I could. Some problems have since changed for the better (i.e. clicking on the configure button of the CL ASIO driver no longer bluescreens or displays an empty window), but the problems described above still happen all the time.
I was wondering if other users have seen the same or similar problems, and if so, what has worked for you?
The system is a Gigabyte 81PE1000Pro2, PCI bus, 3.2GHz P4 with HT enabled, 2G physical RAM, and a 1.5Tb RAID disk system.
Recording when a single sound card (either of the cards works beautifully on its own) is perfect; just when both cards are installed, everything gets confused! Even the WDM drivers don't correctly identify or manage the routing of inputs and outputs reliably.
Sorry to go on about this. If anyone can offer constructive suggestions (I define "constructive" as not telling me to "buy another type of card" or (as one poor soul suggested) telling me that multiple PCI sound cards are not supported under Windows), I would be most grateful.
Thanks and regards,
Peter

Answer 1

G'day Jutapa, thanks for looking at this!
Yeah, I got all the possible ASIO drivers listed, one CL ASIO driver is listed for each card, and I have spent much time trying different configurations of card order, I/O port order, direct sound enabling/disabling, timesync enable/disable, etc.
The problem for me with the CL ASIO drivers is that it limits me to 48/96k sampling only. That is not acceptable, because I need to sample at 44.1k for "straight" conversions to CD, or 192k/24-bit for archival purposes (used for extremely old or fragile recordings), so I end up with large files that nearly always need to be resampled to 44.1k, or saved permanently at 192k/24-bit. Typical filesize is 650Mb, largest so far is 5.66Gb - so that's an awful lot of time spent downsampling or pointless upsampling. I'm starting to think that the problems I'm experiencing may be due to sampling at "non-native" ASIO or WDM rates. I haven't tried sampling at 48/96k to see if that "fixes" the problem...
Using the WDM wrapper drivers (I don't know if these are provided - or supported! - by Creative or Adobe) results in randomly disabling one or the other Audigy. At that point, the only way to recover functionality for the disabled card is to reboot. Sometimes only the inputs are disabled, sometimes only the outputs, sometimes both. There is no pattern that I can see or duplicate.
Both cards appear to work fine under Windows. I can define either card as the default recording or playback device, and I can define one card as the default recording and the other as the default playback, any combination works fine. However, any application that uses WDM drivers to access the cards also get confused when a card's inputs suddenly become disabled! This does not appear to happen when Windows is the only application using the cards.
Specifying "use preferred devices" in Windows does disable the non-selected card (or card input or output if I specify different cards for input and output) in other applications.
The problems are much worse when I try to use any ASIO drivers to access the cards. This problem with ASIO appears regardless of the application I use.
I have installed ASIO4ALL, and it finds and configures the cards without any problems in ALL applications - but if I'm recording (with no other applications or drivers or tray applications loaded or active), when I stop recording and restart, the input I was just recording from appears disabled! If I open the ASIO4ALL configuration window, one or both Audigy cards will have their inputs disabled, or both inputs AND outputs disabled. This doesn't happen all the time, and my workaround is not to stop recording once I've started. Not a good workaround! I do realise that ASIO4ALL does fiddle around with the sample rates in the background, but at least when it works, I get a single clean sample without having to do all the resource-intensive resampling later. Maybe it's 6 of one, 1/2 dozen of the other...
I understand and appreciate that perhaps CL never intended to provide software functionality for more than one Audigy on any given PCI bus/bridge. I just don't get why the drivers appear to work natively under Windows (I'm assuming that Windows just uses WDM access) but not with any other applications.
I will try and do some testing with "native" ASIO sample rates (i.e. 48/96k) and see if that fixes some or all of the problems. My concern here is really that my expectation is that the drivers, once identified and enabled, should not suddenly disable themselves in all applications (by whatever mechanism), regardless of what sample rates are specified. But maybe that's too much to expect.
BTW, this happens with any combination of 2 of my 3 Audigy 2ZS cards, each of which works perfectly on its own with ASIO and WDM drivers. So it's definitely a multiple card issue.
The workaround that has been suggested is to purchase a different vendor's card : but there are so few cards that I can use to sample at the resolutions I require, and they are all so bloody expensive, that's why I've committed so much to CL Audigy 2ZS.
I'll get back to you once I've tried a few days working at the "standard" ASIO sample rates. Thanks again for taking the time with this stupid and unusual problem!
Kind regards,
Peter