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.