Audigy2ZS and 5720 - Page 3

Like so many others here have been experiencing the same issues with certain games on my M570A with an Audigy 2 ZS notebook. Oblivion was one of the games I remember have the distored the most. Just got Silent Hunter 4 and immediately experienced the same problems on the artillery training mission. It was one of the most distorted ones I have heard thus far. So I decided to give it another go at fixing the issue.

The first step was to completely clean off the existing creative drivers and applications. I uninstalled all creative applications in WinXP. I then booted into Safe mode, uninstalled the audigy 2 via the device manager and ran Drive Cleaner Pro.

With the drivers complete cleaned I rebooted to WinXP. WinXP was trying install drivers for the sound card. I clicked canceled on that window and proceeded to install from the audigy 2 install CD. After that was done I installed the 2.09.0016 driver. I also installed the mode utility. I then let WinXP reboot.

With the fresh install of the driver I tested SH4 on the artillery training mission. Same distortion was experienced.

The next test was to experiment with the drivers for PCMCIA controller. I got the latest driver off of Clevo's website. It is version 2.0.0.6 dated 7/6/2006. I rebooted and tried the experiment again. And got the same experiment. Would like to note that installing this driver only seemed to update the Integrated FlashMedia Controller.

So the next thing I did was try forcing different drivers for the PCMCIA controller, but nothing worked. I next tried switching to the generic driver. In order to do so I have to uninstall both the flash media device and the PCMCIA controller. I rebooted WinXP after doing so. After booting winXP was trying to install drivers for the Audigy 2 again. So removing the PCMCIA controller also uninstalled the driver for the audigy 2. I canceled out of the driver update window. I checked the driver for the PCMCIA controller. It said it was now the Generic PCMCIA driver. Looking at the driver date and version number it was exactly the same as before. Seems only the name of the driver changed from Texas Instruments PCIxx21 Cardbus Controller to Generic CardBus Controller. I proceeded to reninstall the 2.09.0016 audigy 2 driver. Upon rebooting I test again and the distortion was gone completely!

To be sure the audigy 2 was running in advanced mode I switched to standard mode and reran the test. The EAX sound effects were not present so I know it rerunning in advanced mode before. I switched back to advanced mode and ran the test again. The EAX sound effects were back, but so was the distortion. Some how the mode selection utility reset the audigy 2 thus reintroducing the distortion.

So I repeated uninstalled the PCMCIA uninstall driver experiment. Upon doing the same steps as before the test resulted in no distortion. I decided to shutdown the laptop and boot back into WinXP and try the test again. The distortion was back. At this point I knew there was not a hardware issue keeping advanced mode from working and it had to be a software issue. Read else were that some Audigy 2 users has success with disabling CTHelper.exe. Decided to try it and use msconfig to disable CTHelper.exe from loading at startup. Doing so required that I reboot. After reboot I ran the test again and the distortion was gone!

At this point need to reinstall Oblivion and see if the distorition is gone there. My results are some what inconclusive having tested only one game. At least I know I can get EAX working in SH4 which I plan on playing quite a bit. Also I can't really be certain if the clean driver installed had any affect. Perhaps some others here might be interested in performing there own tests. I will follow up with my Oblivion testing post later today.

Just did some testing in Oblivion. Didn't have any of my old save games so I could quickly revisit some of the places I recall having extreme distortion. I did play through the opening sequence which I recall had one definite spot with distortion. It was the area with the goblin shaman. I saved just before entering this area. I first went through with CTHELPER.EXE disabled via msconfig and I could only hear very very slight distortion for about half second while fighting a goblin. I then renabled CTHELPER.EXE in msconfig, rebooted and reloaded the area. The distortion was very noticable with CTHELPER.EXE running. I did look in the task manger to confirm that it was running.

Just to be 100% sure I disable CTHELPER.EXE in msconfig again, rebooted and loaded the save game. The distortion was gone. I would say that is fairly conclusive that CTHELPER.EXE should be disabled for those experiencing distortion with the audigy 2 ZS notebook pluged into the M570A. If it still doesn't work suggest a clean audigy 2 driver install via Driver Cleaner Pro.

My guess is the are some rare occasions where the bandwidth of the PCMCIA controller is exceeded. I wonder if using the feature mode selection utility to select 24-bit/48kHz would lower the bandwidth required? Most games use a maximum sampling of 48kHz anyway. Don't have any further good tests to see if this would help.