Sound Setup for WoW

RainofTerra

RainofTerra

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 17, 2005
Messages
176
System: Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz, 4GB ram (3.25gb really, ty Vista 32), Vista 32 SP1, GeForce 8800GT

So I'm a huge World of Warcraft nerd. and I'm a huge World of Warcraft Nerd who loves in game sound. I picked up a Logitech Z5500 set and I've been trying to figure out if I can get better sound quality while playing the game. I'm currently using on board audio (Sigmatel I think? I'm at work so I can't look). I tried the X-Fi Titanium but Alchemy was a complete disaster and caused my system to crash several times.

So now I'm looking at other options. My main criteria is quality, second is performance. If whatever I end up with has a way to let me enable hardware sound under Vista for better performance, cool, but not a deal breaker.

I've been looking a lot at the Xonar DX today, but I've also heard people talking about USB options having the best sound quality - any recommendations as far as a 5.1-capable USB audio solution? Or should I just try out the Xonar DX?

Thanks!
 
I'm in the same boat as you. The XFi XTreme Audio I was using caused WoW to crash as well under Vista64. I'm looking for a nice card for around $100 that will work with Vista 64.
 
WoW should work fine, so long as you don't use ALchemy. Yes, I realize that's one of the reasons to own an X-Fi. However creative can't seem to un-break their OpenAL implementation (funny, since they wrote the OpenAL spec). So if you don't use ALchemy and just let WoW do software audio rendering, it should work fine. WoW does 5.1 surround in software mode so it isn't a problem.
 
Yeah, I'm just looking for something that has higher quality than my onboard. I think I'm going to try a Xonar DX and see how it works out.

Its amazing how stupid sound support is between games, the cards themselves and Microsofts implementation of Direct Sound in Vista. Yuck.
 
Goatbert,

Although I don't play WoW any more, I did recently boot up the game with my Titanium using ALchemy with no issues - at least on Vista x64.

Perhaps you had something configured incorrectly?

As Sycraft mentioned, WoW can use a software audio API with your Titanium, and that will give you multi-channel sound - just rendered in software, and limited to 64 channels. Or you can run WoW in XP SP2 compatability mode with ALchemy enabled to access hardware accerlerated sound and 128 channels.
 
i was gonna say, you sure your running wow in XP SP2 compatability mode? The alchemy site has a ** beside it saying that you have to do it to make wow run right.
 
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