Hissing sound in SH3

[Excalibur Bane]

Not sure when this started happening, but I have recently removed my Sound Blaster Audigy and enabled the onboard Nvidia Soundstorm stuff. I'm using an A7N8X Deluxe board, Revision 2. For some reason, I'm getting a great deal of hissing in certain sounds, such as the underwater ambient sound when looking through the external camera. All the other noises are really muted as well. I can barely hear the engines when I'm running full speed surfaced and in the map view.

I have the latest Nforce drivers installed, as well as Forceware drivers. Any idea what the problem could be? Do I need to reinstall perhaps because I switched sound devices? :doh:

[Average Joe]

Hi,

I used to use the MB (AC '97) on-board sound chip too, but it caused so many sound problems with games, I bought an OEM SB-Live! a long time ago, and that took care of 99% of all game problems.

It may be a good idea to re-install your old sound-card. I always thought it'd be nice/efficient to use the built-in sound chip too, but it sure didn't work out that way.

Btw built-in sound chips (on the MB) require some CPU-power to run, that will rob power from games, etc. Add-on sound cards do not consume CPU power like built-in sound chips do.

[Cdre Gibs]

Not sure when this started happening, but I have recently removed my Sound Blaster Audigy and enabled the onboard Nvidia Soundstorm stuff.

Thats your problem right there. On Board anything will take a hit against your CPU. Why in heveans name would you want to take out an SB Audigy SC for beats the heck outa me! As stated above, reinstall it, your PC will thank you.

[Excalibur Bane]

It wasn't a choice I had or have. The Audigy has reached the end of it's lifespan, sadly. I'm aware that using onboard APU is more CPU consuming then using an audio card with it's own APU as well. This is the only audio I can have at the moment.

[scandium]

My old XP 2600+ was installed on an identical asus mb and I used soundstorm exclusively with no hiss, no problems of any kind in any game including SH3.

I also use the onboard audio (ALC850 7.1) on my new board with same results. The mantra that onboard audio is "crap" is no longer necessarily true as its come along way beginning with Soundstorm. In fact, the only audio problems I ever had was the well known (though not to me until later) conflict between my SB Live and Via chipset on my old Intel box which resulted in hiss, stuttering, and other assorted glitches. That drove me nuts and I've never bought a SB since (it being the only card to have this problem which Creative, at least while I owned it, never did address... that was also my last VIA board too so the experience cost both companies at least one customer as it was not unique to me).

[kiwi_2005]

Yup correct, onboard sound is not good for gaming, but theres tons of cheap soundblaster cards out there. For a basic Soundblaster 5n1 sound card, costs $60-80 here. So probably cheaper where you are

[scandium]

Oh and as to the CPU hit from onboard audio, I doubt it amounts to much of anything, especially when the benefits of discrete audio are weighed dollar for dollar against more video processing power, more cpu power, and more RAM. If you have plenty of both and/or are an audio purist (with high quality digital speakers to plug the card into) than why not, but from a performance perspective discrete audio probably adds the lowest bang for the while I doubt many people could tell the difference in audio quality, on the typical analog speaker setups, between any decent onboard audio codec versus an Audigy or X-Fi.

[Valgua]

Yup correct, onboard sound is not good for gaming, but theres tons of cheap soundblaster cards out there. For a basic Soundblaster 5n1 sound card, costs $60-80 here. So probably cheaper where you are

Well, I'm using onboard sound (AC97) and it works perfectly even with SH3. May be the problems come when using a relatively slow CPU or too little RAM. I don't know...

Valgua