Audigy 2 ZS Notebook popping issue/workaround

I will be getting one for Christmas so thanks for the heads up!!

i just got mine yesterday. i had the same problem as you sometimes. only when playing counterstrike though, through my headphones. Music and DVD's were fine. My only complaint so far is that when listening through headphones, the maximum volume doesnt seem to be as loud as with my default sound card. Is there more than one volume control that I am not seeing??

.....did you just say quake 1???? Thought I was the only one who still installed that once a year just for kicks for a few hours.

yay i didnt see that wave volume before....haha i knew there was something i wasnt seeing. problem solved

Very annoying bug solved with one strange solution! I've forwarded this to Creative after verifying it does, in fact, work!

i had posted a while back about this problem but, this doesnt work on my system. I still hear the pop noise. Very annoying.... i did find that if you enable the standard features it does go away but, then the hardware acceleration is disabled for gaming. Hopefully this is a driver issue and it will be fixed....

Hi everyone here ! ^_^

I bought this card here in France from Creative Europe (located in Ireland) and I have had the same problem njcompfan mentioned, horrible cracks/pops in all sounds, and too much time spent to try to fix that damn problem on my Acer Aspire 1501Lmi (Athlon64 3000+, 512MoDDR, Radeon 9600, Hitachi 60Go @ 7200rpm, Ricoh PCMCIA card)...

I have spent more than two hours on the phone with the tech support from Creative Europe, trying to solve the problem, but nothing worked. The man I talked to on the phone told me he would mention my problem to the "Advanced Tech Department". I tried to change the ACPI on my notebook, tried many different tweaks, disabled all not-so-needed peripherals from my system, tried all driver versions from Creative, but nothing worked... The ONLY thing I did not try was to re-assignate the IRQs on my system, because I would have had to reinstall my OS to do this and I did not want to do this.

So they asked me to send my card back to them for a "priority test", which I did, and they should receive it in the next few days now. I hope it is only a problem with the card so that they simply have to send me a new one, but given the fact that many people here seem to have a similar problem with that card, I am not sure the problem comes from it...

Well, anyway, as soon as I get it back, I will try njcompfan's strange fix, and I hope it makes it work as good as it should with my notebook!

I also hear the pops. Do this, look at the tray icon that says Sound Blaster Performance. (Small green/black box in the tray). Make sure you are on Performance Mode and not high performance. READ the note at the bottom. See if this helps any. It worked for me.

I am with you bro, I am just trying to help. Obviously Creative knows of this problem because it is listed on their software when it came out. My desktop Audigy 2 ZS had driver problems too. I guess we are at the mercy of Creative on this one.

to get the WPcredit settings to stick you needed to run another program as well as that to get it to hold.

Hi there !

Could someone here with the card and the 'cracks-pops problem' tell us if the pci latency patch for motherboards with a VIA chipset resolves the frequent interruptions when playing music?

Patch can be found here: George Breese's PCI Latency Patch

As soon as I get my card back from Creative, I will do some testing and try to get rid of that damn problem...

I just read this thread and I thought I would share my experience. I installed a Notebook Audigy 2 on my Sager 9860 (TI 1410 PCMCIA chip) with no problems. However, I installed another Audigy 2 Notebook on my sister's Dell 8200 (TI 1450 PCMCIA chip) and it had the popping sounds issue. I enabled the bass boost (in the Creative speaker settings) on her machine and the popping sounds issue went away. Prior to selecting Bass Boost there was popping before each sound no matter what the sound volume level was set at. Turning the Bass Boost on and off was blind luck. This is just another data point and it is very repeatable: turn the Bass Boost off and the popping returns, turn on Bass Boost back on and the popping stops. This behavior occurred at all sound level settings.

All of the above is with the newer Creative drivers.

Robert

Creative has release a driver update for the performance selector on 12/22/04. I dowloaded this which allows for a few more settings on the performance mode and so far I have had no problems. Make sure you use the autoupdate.

Another thing to about the popping is to hit the Default button in Surround Mixer. That will get rid of it 100% of the time for me. Doesn't help with static for ENE users though....

I will have to check out this driver update.

It's odd that I've been in regular email contact with their support team yet they never told me about this update.....


edit: I looked at the Creative support page and the only update for 12/22 is the EAX Console patch which has nothing to do with fixing these popping/static problems. The latest driver is still 12/2/04.

[quote=edit: I looked at the Creative support page and the only update for 12/22 is the EAX Console patch which has nothing to do with fixing these popping/static problems. The latest driver is still 12/2/04.[/QUOTE]

Yes, but the patch allow you to adjust the performance settings from just standard or performance. This allowed me to remove the static altogether.