OK, I've talked about this problem before but there are a lot of smart people around here who may have more thoughts on this strange problem I have with my Audigy2ZS PCMCIS card on my 5720.

I've included a 455KB WMA sample of the sound recording about a minute of the FEAR performance demo test. It's hard to describe:

sample sound

It seems somewhat like the sound of a dolby or DTS digitial signal being fed into a decoder that is unable to resolve it properly.

Background and attempted fixes:

- My previous notebook was an Athon64 on a VIA chipset with an ATi graphcis card and my Audigy2ZS worked flawlessly all the time.

- The same card when plugged into my new Sager 5720 made the above noise but only while playing EAX enabled 3D games, any EAX 3D games including FEAR, BF2, Doom3, Unreal Tournament 2k4.

- The card works fine, great in fact, for all other applications including music, DVD, video, or any non-EAX enabled games. Waching DVDs with the Creative card is awesome and all effects work great.

- Turning off EAX features in games, in Creative Control Panels, reduces the distortion slightly but not much. In 2k4 there is an option "Use Old Sound Algorithms" that fixes the issue but the sound is very low quality and is simply using very old Creative Drivers. Changing the BF2OpenAL.dll file to the newer creative on in the BF2 folder doesn't fix it for BF2 either.

- I contacted Creative and they send me a brand new card complete in unopened retail packaging and the problem remained. So nothing wrong with the card.

- I tried every variation of the Creative Drivers I could get my hands on even the betas, I uninstalled, cleaned, reinstalled, etc. I disabled on board audio on the 5720 from Windows and the BIOS even. I uninstalled and updated the Realtek drivers. I even completely reformated the drive and reinstalled Windows. The exact same problem remains.

- I've used a variety of headphones and external speakers. I've plugged in the analogue surround sound dongle that comes with the card, I've even plugged the laptop into my living room digital surround sound system and still get the same problem.

- I've read all the threads I could find on the well documented audio hissing problems in the headphones of the 5720 and tried all those things including disabling my IR port, muting all the non used audio inputs, swapping the headphone inputs around, my onboard audio generally works well and is consistent with what everyone else describes.

Anyway, if I missed mentioning something here I have probably tried that too, I am a pretty good troubleshooter and don't like not being able to solve problems. Maybe somewhere out there someone will recognize the obscene noise coming out of this card and say...."Hey I know what that is" since not even Creative has a clue, at least not the first tier tech support folks that just tell me to send the card in again.

This is the thread with the working link

After sending this same message to Creative technical support the one suggestion I hadn't tried was to reduce audio hardware acceleration in the DX9 control panel to "Basic". I tried that and then settled on "Standard" acceleration and it seems to be working fine now in games.

The problem with reducing the audio hardware acceleration one notch to "Standard" seems to be that it disables EAX and other advanced features of the card but the audio quality is good and the sound is distortion free in all the games I tested. I don't know what other drawbacks will result from reducing the hardware acceleration level.

This is more of a workaround than a proper solution to the problem. Clearly there is an issue with the Audigy2ZS PCMCIA card or it's drivers and I am upset that I'm not going to be able to use the advanced features of the card at all. I'm also upset at the amount of time wasted on this issue and the lack of a more timely response from Creative earlier on when I initially had the problem.

I hope this thread helps anyone else who may be experiencing similar problems.

Talk about a bad time for me to find this thread. I just received my Audigy2ZS pcmcia card from newegg today. I am in process of getting it setup and will try some EAX games later... the problem I am having at the moment is getting the sound forwarded to the Realtek driver for output on system speakers. I looked here to see if any had similar problems... but yours looks much worse!

I got the audio playback working on the laptop speakers and loaded up Doom 3 and CS:Source for some gameplay. I was getting some "ticking" in Doom 3 but everything sounded pretty clean in CS:S... I will give the card a try on my S750 speakers later when I get some time.

Hey noah5720! Thanks for replying and I'm interested to find out how it works out for you. I know of a lot of people in these forums that use the same card with the 5720 and have no trouble at all so it really baffles me.

The slight popping noise you heard may be the same problem on a lesser scale.

Did you listen to the WMA file I linked to in my first post? It sounds terrible but the strange thing is that after a complete cleaning and reinstalling of the Creative Drivers it works great for a little while (sometimes a couple days) at full hardware acceleration and with EAX enabled. The distortion gradually sets in over time and wiping and reinstalling the drivers fixes it again for a short while. Shutting down, letting everything cool off, removing and reinserting the card doesn't fix it. Pretty bizzarre huh?

Another thing I found is that if I reduce the DX9 hardware acceleration for the card, play for a little while, then push the hardware acceleration back up to full it works with EAX again for a short while then the distortion starts creeping in again. Turning off EAX options in the game alone won't get rid of the problem it simply reduces it slightly. To fix the sound I need to go back and reduce hardware acceleration to "Standard" or lower.

I went to play Doom 3 again and now I get the same audio distortion as the clip you posted. This is very annoying to say the least. I have the newest creative drivers and the newest realtek drivers installed that I could locate. I will try the lower hardware acceleration as a work around for now.

This is what Creative has said to me...sort of. They said by running in a reduced hardware acceleration mode as I described above I am reducing the bandwidth requirements of the PCMCIA bus and that it's not capable of "handling the demands of the audio card's advanced features."

On the other hand, after playing UT2k4 for about an hour with the Audigy2ZS working fine with "Standard Acceleration" and EAX off, the audio distortion began to creep back again over the next 30 minutes until it was totally unusable.

It's not a heat issue since cooling everything down and rebooting didn't make the problem go away and it's present in all games even after reducing hardware acceleration further to "Basic."

It's definately a driver compatibility issue but Creative either isn't coming clean with me or doesn't know. Sager also doesn't seem to be aware of any incompatibilities since they sell the Audigy2ZS as an option with the 5720 through the resellers. Unfortunately, unless you purchased them together, Sager can't offer tech support on the Audigy2 card.

Any further info would be greatly appreciated and I would not recommend purchasing this card for a Sager notebook unless you can be certain of your ability to easily return the card for a refund if it won't work.

On the other hand, if you aren't a gamer it seems to work great with Audio and Video applications. The problem only occurs when playing 3D games with 3D surround sound.

yup its so sad ,to have an "advanced" sound card ,and still cant use its "advanced" features..... Very disapointed...I've also tried everything but still cant figure out wtf is going on...

Well I found an interesting page on Creative's website. Basically lists all the known PCMCIA controllers that are not compatible with notebook card as well as some that only work in "standard feature mode", and a short list of those that do work in "advanced feature mode".

http://dmzweb3.europe.creative.com/S....creative.com/

However, the TI PCI-XX21 found in the Sager5720 notebook is nowhere to be found on any of the lists. Other similar TI controllers pop-up in all three lists though... seems this has been quite a known issue for some time which raises the question of why Sager is even offering an option of purchasing the Audigy2zs with the laptop from factory... though in my case I purchased from newegg.

noah5720 that link doesn't work for me....it's an empty page.

So I see I'm not the only one with this issue. It appears the problem is hardware related and due to the PCMCIA controller card in the 5720 rather than the Creative card.

This already occurred to me and I previously experiemented with different driver versions for the controller including some from different notebook manufacturers that use the same card.

Try this link instead: http://www.soundblaster.com/products...k/notebook.asp

Thanks, that worked.

I see the TI PCXX20 is listed as fully compatible on two different systems. We have the TI PCXX21 which I would assume is very similar, maybe the cardbus controller is the difference, I don't know.

I'll experiment with more drivers, possibly installing TI PCXX20 drivers.

Interestingly enough, when I check the driver version in hardware manager for the PCMCIA adapter it shows up as the TI PCXX20 but with the manufacturer and driver provider listed as Microsoft and the driver version is 5.1.2600.0 dated 7/1/2001. This is even after installing the latest drivers from Sager website.

Under device manager....PCMCIA and Flash memory devices it lists the correct manufacturer and the latest TI drivers that I installed. I'm not sure what this means or why there are two devices listed in device manager for the PCMCIA card.

I'm curious is this is normal.