Asus P5K-E sound problems?

T

Tabs

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 24, 2005
Messages
147
Hey guys,

I just built my best friend a new system yesterday using the P5K-E, which I picked out for him largely based on the [H] review of the Deluxe version of it. Everything's working great except for the audio - something is really screwed up and I can't figure it out.

We're running Vista Home Premium and I've tried both the CD SoundMax drivers and the ones on the Asus site.

What's happening is that it doesn't seem to be outputting to more than just the two front speakers. He has a 4.1 setup with plugs for the front and rear channels - I'm positive it's set up right, it works fine on his old machine etc... The sound test in the driver plays the same sound out of both speakers when you run it instead of doing the proper left/right like it says on-screen. When it tries to play the test sound on the rear speakers nothing at all comes out.

There's a feature on this audio chipset where it can use the front headphone out as a separate windows playback device so you can do things like route Vent or Teamspeak to the headphones and have the game audio still come out of the real speakers. This does not work at all either - just silence when you test it.

Anyone have any idea what's going on here? I really doubt it's a hardware problem, has driver issue written all over it by my estimation.

Thanks,
Ryan
 
My experience with Vista sound is that the CD drivers and the motherboard manufacturer drivers don't work well. Your best bet is to go directly to Soundmax's website and grab whatever their newest drivers are. That's the only way I could get my realtek audio to work with Vista.
 
Tried that - there's no drivers available on their site, it just directs you to Asus's page...
 
After all the time I wasted trying to get the on board sound working properly on my P5B Deluxe with XP, I would recommend disabling it in the bios. It uses the same Analog Devices AD1988B chipset as the new P5K series and they haven't fixed the P5B Deluxe yet so it's foolish to believe that it's going to work properly on a different board.

Lots of great features on paper but the reality is very disappointing and completely unusable unless you're deaf.
 
With Vista x64, which I'm using, I just use the native HD audio driver in Vista, and it works pretty good. I gave up on Asus/Soundmax/1988 specific drivers, for now.
 
We switched it to the default Vista drivers and everything's working except rear speaker output now...
 
Using Vista audio, if you're playing mp3's, for instance, they are in Stereo; so native 5.1 channels, etc. without sound card processing won't work.

To get quasi 4, 5.1, etc. speaker sound, enable "Speaker Fill" under the Playback Devices settings.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top