Soundblaster X AE-5 Woes......

Joined
Jul 9, 2001
Messages
896
Well...seems the creative issues regarding driver support and hardware recognition have gotten me. I've installed a AE-5 in my rig and it only gets recognized about 50% of the time.

Seems there were a lot of issues with this in the Z card line, and from what I've read they've made it over to here.

Should I just grab an Asus Xonar, use Dolby Headphone and call it a day?

Or is the immersive sound engine in the SB cards worth it over Dolby Headphone?

I'm 90% looking for a card that will support immersive gaming. Any thoughts?
 
Define "immersive gaming".

Constant driver issues is the reason I gave up on Creative. I've tried few other brand over many years, but after different issues I've simply switched to HDMI audio over a video card and a basic Yamaha receiver. Proper digital quality, uncompressed multi-channel 24-bit 192KHz audio, proper hardware Dolby headphone mixing when plugged, no driver nonsense.
 
I would contact Creative because you might have a faulty card.
No other sound card will compare to the sound quality of the AE-5, you would be wise to try and stick with it.
 
We can thank Microsoft for most of the driver issues. Directsound is gone and the audio pipeline is full of DRM restrictions thanks to the mafia RIAA/MPAA.
 
Define "immersive gaming".

Constant driver issues is the reason I gave up on Creative. I've tried few other brand over many years, but after different issues I've simply switched to HDMI audio over a video card and a basic Yamaha receiver. Proper digital quality, uncompressed multi-channel 24-bit 192KHz audio, proper hardware Dolby headphone mixing when plugged, no driver nonsense.

Id like to run some sort of virtual surround while playing.
 
I would contact Creative because you might have a faulty card.
No other sound card will compare to the sound quality of the AE-5, you would be wise to try and stick with it.

Yeah, i reached out, but what ive been reading on the other forums doesnt look promising.
 
https://www.asus.com/us/Sound-Cards/Essence_STX_II/

Give this a try. I havn't looked back.

I use the 7.1 edition.

Yeah I saw that. I’m comparing all of them now. That uses Dolby Headphone? Correct?

So....maybe a good solution is to grabs a Schiit Stack, and run Razer’s virtual surround on that? I’m starting to see that maybe an itegrated/internal sound card might be inferior to an external amp and DAC, and if I want to run virtual surround I can use a software solution.
 
Yeah I saw that. I’m comparing all of them now. That uses Dolby Headphone? Correct?

So....maybe a good solution is to grabs a Schiit Stack, and run Razer’s virtual surround on that? I’m starting to see that maybe an itegrated/internal sound card might be inferior to an external amp and DAC, and if I want to run virtual surround I can use a software solution.

How much money do you want to spend? For the price of Essence STX II you can get proper HDMI receiver with all the surround enhancement you can dream of.
 
How much money do you want to spend? For the price of Essence STX II you can get proper HDMI receiver with all the surround enhancement you can dream of.

I'm game. So, the ES2 is around $200? What can I get for that?

Wait...are you talking about a full fledged receiver? Like, HT receiver? Yeah...not wanting anything that big.
 
We can thank Microsoft for most of the driver issues. Directsound is gone and the audio pipeline is full of DRM restrictions thanks to the mafia RIAA/MPAA.

Creative's drivers were even worse during the Directsound days. Hell, Creative's driver woes was the primary reason Microsoft turned Directsound into strictly a software driven stereo output and made the XAudio API. Besides, XAudio is a better API anyways.

Secondly, the audio path is pretty free from DRM beyond the decoding process.
 
Hell, Creative's driver woes was the primary reason Microsoft turned Directsound into strictly a software driven stereo output and made the XAudio API.
Citation needed for this.
 
IIRC directsound was dropped mainly in order to create a DRM layer so the users couldn't directly tap into audio or video streams. It had the excuse of isolating the drivers but as we've all seen it did jack shit to stability in reality. All it incorporated was more problems and dropped support for surround on older games.
 
Creative are not mentioned.

"Third party" for audio in the early 2000's basically equated to Creative, given they had run pretty much everyone out of the market by 2000. It's the politically nice way to throw Creative under the bus without calling them out by name.

IIRC directsound was dropped mainly in order to create a DRM layer so the users couldn't directly tap into audio or video streams. It had the excuse of isolating the drivers but as we've all seen it did jack shit to stability in reality. All it incorporated was more problems and dropped support for surround on older games.

The difference now is when the audio driver is unstable, you just lose the application, as opposed to the entire OS. Secondly, there are plenty of options to restore surround for older Directsound titles, including numerous directsound to OpenAL wrappers.
 
Well...seems the creative issues regarding driver support and hardware recognition have gotten me. I've installed a AE-5 in my rig and it only gets recognized about 50% of the time.

Seems there were a lot of issues with this in the Z card line, and from what I've read they've made it over to here.

Should I just grab an Asus Xonar, use Dolby Headphone and call it a day?

Or is the immersive sound engine in the SB cards worth it over Dolby Headphone?

I'm 90% looking for a card that will support immersive gaming. Any thoughts?

I have AE-5 in all my systems - They can be a bit temperamental, however, nothing as much as the Z series was. I've found there's less issue when use PCIe 3.0 slot vs 2.0, very rarely then (certain windows or driver updates can cause default sound to be changed) - If AE-5 has no sound after your booted, be sure to check its the default under windows sound, then if need be do a full power off, give it couple seconds and power back on (that has always worked for me). I've also had the same issues with the Asus Strix Raid Pro as fyi...

The AE-5 does sound very well - I have it paired with Sennheiser Headset (Game Zero) - excellent sound in-game for the few of us that it even matters to these days...
 
Last edited:
"Third party" for audio in the early 2000's basically equated to Creative, given they had run pretty much everyone out of the market by 2000. It's the politically nice way to throw Creative under the bus without calling them out by name.



The difference now is when the audio driver is unstable, you just lose the application, as opposed to the entire OS. Secondly, there are plenty of options to restore surround for older Directsound titles, including numerous directsound to OpenAL wrappers.


I'd say that nowadays surround sound is lackluster and nothing has been done to improve it since actual hardware acceleration was banned by Microsoft. The ONLY recent game that has really tried to implement good surround sound is Hunt: Showdown. Even then I wish there was hardware dedicated to sound available. I bet the Hunt developers would triple the amount of sound cues in their game if they didn't have to worry about someone with an older PC architecture suffering poor performance because their CPU is being taxed by numerous sound processing tasks.

Then there is VR where positional sound is key to a good experience. I've yet to hear a game with proper sound in VR. Everything is so rudimentary because of a lack of system resources. Maybe AMD and Nvidia should dedicate more of their video cards to processing surround sound for VR and general gaming so we can have a dedicated hardware solution again?

Here is an example from AMD with AMD TrueAudio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_TrueAudio

Does Nvidia have a similar feature or one coming soon? They used to have SoundStorm and it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I'd love for them to bring that back and implement it directly onto the GPU.
 
The difference now is when the audio driver is unstable, you just lose the application, as opposed to the entire OS. Secondly, there are plenty of options to restore surround for older Directsound titles, including numerous directsound to OpenAL wrappers.

That's the gist of it. I've seen bluescreens and total system freezes still caused by the audio subsystem, which was supposed to be impossible after the isolation. The options you mention do not work with all hardware and games, making running older titles a royal pain.
 
This worked. FYI for anyone.

Check in the Windows Control panel under power options. Use the Action Center icon down by the clock, then All Settings, System, Power and Sleep. On the right side use the Additional Power Settings link. When that control panel opens up choose the link on the left that says Choose what the Power Button does. On this menu page make sure Fast Startup is not checked (if it is an option that is shown) If it is there and checked use the change options link and uncheck it.
 
I cant remember the last time i had ANY issue with my Sound blast Z card. And in truth that Dolby Atmos seems kinda redundant or unnecessary lol. I dont think the fast start up even shows in mine, maybe is why mine is fine!
 
I'd say that nowadays surround sound is lackluster and nothing has been done to improve it since actual hardware acceleration was banned by Microsoft. The ONLY recent game that has really tried to implement good surround sound is Hunt: Showdown. Even then I wish there was hardware dedicated to sound available. I bet the Hunt developers would triple the amount of sound cues in their game if they didn't have to worry about someone with an older PC architecture suffering poor performance because their CPU is being taxed by numerous sound processing tasks.

Then there is VR where positional sound is key to a good experience. I've yet to hear a game with proper sound in VR. Everything is so rudimentary because of a lack of system resources. Maybe AMD and Nvidia should dedicate more of their video cards to processing surround sound for VR and general gaming so we can have a dedicated hardware solution again?

Here is an example from AMD with AMD TrueAudio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_TrueAudio

Does Nvidia have a similar feature or one coming soon? They used to have SoundStorm and it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I'd love for them to bring that back and implement it directly onto the GPU.

Hardware sound acceleration is still a thing; the only thing MSFT did was make Directsound a strictly software API. Other APIs such as OpenAL or Microsoft's own XAudio can still be hardware accelerated. Hell, Creative even replaced EAX with a new OpenAL based EFX library,

Secondly, audio processing, while sensitive to processor latency, is not that taxing on CPU resources. About the only thing the CPU needs to do is get the next sound sample(s) and push to whatever the output device is. Adding a few more streams isn't going to make any dent in CPU processing time, especially since you can handle all the sound fields in a single thread.

Note even HW accelerated APIs didn't handle surround all that well either. Case in point, you could tell exactly where audio transitions occurred; they were never really handled correctly. Move to new area and all audio cues get cut off/replaced, rather then audio organically dying down. To handle sound well requires a lot more processing resources, not to mention time/money by developers. And given 99.99% of the world uses stereo, the situation isn't going to change anytime soon. At best, you get a generic 7.1 implementation, which is relatively free for developers to do.
 
Hardware sound acceleration is still a thing; the only thing MSFT did was make Directsound a strictly software API. Other APIs such as OpenAL or Microsoft's own XAudio can still be hardware accelerated. Hell, Creative even replaced EAX with a new OpenAL based EFX library,

Secondly, audio processing, while sensitive to processor latency, is not that taxing on CPU resources. About the only thing the CPU needs to do is get the next sound sample(s) and push to whatever the output device is. Adding a few more streams isn't going to make any dent in CPU processing time, especially since you can handle all the sound fields in a single thread.

Note even HW accelerated APIs didn't handle surround all that well either. Case in point, you could tell exactly where audio transitions occurred; they were never really handled correctly. Move to new area and all audio cues get cut off/replaced, rather then audio organically dying down. To handle sound well requires a lot more processing resources, not to mention time/money by developers. And given 99.99% of the world uses stereo, the situation isn't going to change anytime soon. At best, you get a generic 7.1 implementation, which is relatively free for developers to do.
VR is one technology that really needs a ton more sound channels. I have yet to hear a VR game with convincing sound. Thus my VR headset sits in the corner of the room unused.
 
Back
Top