Nice card but Creative apps never worked
Written: Sep 26 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good analog sound
Cons: Bad MIDI sound; Bad apps never completely worked; Installation was very tough
The Bottom Line: Unless, you're very good at software installation, RUN, don't walk, away from this product.
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| mgoto441's Full Review: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer Sound Car... |
I just replace a Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla (an older card) with a Creative SB Audigy 1394. I didn't need the 1394 (my systemboard already has a 1394 port), but I had read that the sound quality was very good (only partly true as I'll mention later).
Now I'm pretty experienced at building PCs from the ground up, installing Windows on a bare PC, and upgrading to Windows XP. I've also maintained 5 Windows PC from Win 9x days to Win XP.
So I did some prep work and searched the Creative Web Site for any driver updates as well as searched the installation CD and copied the drivers folder onto my hard drive before physically installing the card. I also completely removed any drivers for the old Turtle Beach card just before shutting down and removing the card, itself.
When I booted up after putting in the new Audigy card, Win 98SE prompted me for drivers and I used the driver folder that I had copied off of the CD to get the card going. Voila! I had sound.
After completing the boot-up, I loaded the Creative CD and and proceeded to perform the automated Creative install. This process took a few minutes and then prompted for a re-boot. Upon re-boot, there were a bunch of new Creative Icons, but no sound. I looked at the Multimedia option within Control Panel and there were no playback, recording, or MIDI devices available. The automated install had disabled the card drivers.
So I thought, well I'll just manually install the drivers using the Add Hardware wizard within the Control Panel, I pointed to the drivers folder that I had copied from the CD. When the wizard tried to finish, something failed big-time and my computer re-booted. After it finished re-booting, I looked in Device Manager and the driver status indicated that the drivers had failed in a previous attempt would not be started. Hmmmm...
So I thought, I've downloaded the latest updates from the Web--I'll just install those. When I double-clicked on the downloaded Audrvvxd.exe, it started and then promptly told me that I had to install working drivers before it could apply the update. :(
So I tried one other trick, and went into Device Manager, selected the SB Audigy device and clicked on the Update Drivers button. When I pointed to the Drivers folder, it installed the drivers and hoping that all of my troubles were over, I clicked on the Creative AudioHQ icon to look see about loading a SoundFont. Unfortunately, this Creative App said, the device was not properly installed. When I looked at the Multimedia option within the Control Panel, there were no devices available.
So, out of desperation, I tried double-clicking on the downloaded Audrvvxd.exe and this time it appeared to start before freezing the PC.
So after re-booting, I took a look at c:\windows\temp to see if I could find any folders left by Audrvvxd.exe during installation. I got lucky and found a drivers folder just like on the CD. I copied this to my hard drive and then tried the Add Hardware wizard within Control Panel. When I pointed to these drivers, I heard sound from the sound card! After re-booting, I tried to run Audrvvxd.exe again and this time, it ran. Updates were installed and I was prompted to re-boot again.
After re-booting, I double-clicked on the Creative AudioHQ icon and this time it worked, EXCEPT that the SoundFont icon disappeared. So I couldn't load sound fonts--one of the features that I was looking forward to using. Anyway, as I continued testing, I discovered that the default MIDI wavetable sounds were markedly poor in quality. The 4MB hardware wavetable in my Turtle Beach sounded much more realistic than the 8MB default Audigy Sound Font.
So I searched the Internet for a Sound Font utility and downloaded it. It worked and now I had nice MIDI sounds. Course this was using 3rd party software!?!
So I started an incident report with Creative. After a week of doing just what I did above about 4 times, Creative Support concluded that I needed to re-install Windows 98 SE.
The bottom line is that the card works fine, except for the Sound Font utility, most of the apps work well, and with a 3rd party app called SFExplorer, I can load Sound Fonts.
But what a trip it was to get to a satisfactory result!
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 58
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Epinions.com ID:
mgoto441
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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