Creative Soundblaster Live on Vista

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V99

Gawd
Joined
Aug 17, 2005
Messages
689
Sound is something I've never been terribly fussed on.
Sure it'd be awesome to have a fancy setup but most of the little money I have goes into the real stuff like new CPUs and Video Cards.

Recently I brought a headset and my onboard audio sucks. It's not loud enough and doesn't even provide audio to the left speaker.
My mate gave me an old sound card he had, it's a Creative Soundblaster Live! Value from 1999.

Sadly Creative doesn't support this card anymore and doesn't provide drivers for Vista(which I'm using). Windows Update does have drivers for this card but they're absolutely crap, the Line In has static, microphone doesn't work, and the Line out quality is shocking.

I looked around and the best drivers I found was a driver set done by 'Naimad Mod'. These drivers work great, quality is great, nice and loud, Line In and Microphone work.

Only one problem.

When I play Gears of War or Call of Duty 4 I get really, really bad Audio distortions. Like a really loud static that can really hurt your ears. I found a fix for COD where you lower the sound quality to 22K and it works fine. But no such option is in Gears.

In essence, does anyone still have a legendary Soundblaster Live Value and still have it working on Vista without any problems?

Or can you recommend a cheap replacement that will provide crisp sound that has Vista support?

Cheers
 
Oh man, Live Value? Onboard audio is semi-decent nowadays. I'd think it'll sound better than a Live card. This may sound silly, but did you double check the windows sound settings? How about the Realtek (or whatever sound chip) sound manager? Make sure wave audio is up and everything is balanced. Also have you tried the kx drivers? Somebody mentioned they're more geared toward good music production, but they might fix your gaming issues. I don't know. Best of luck!

EDIT: Heh, forgot the link for the kx drivers. Here you go:
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?language=en
 
Ok I've gone back to my onboard, found some new drivers and it's pumping out some decent sound from my speakers.
But when I plug my headset in, even on loudest I can only just hear it, I just tried another headset and that has the same problem (headets completely different brands and both work fine on other devices).

The headset works just fine on the Creative.

My onboard is C-media CM6501.

Damnit this is annoying.
 
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