I've got a Sound Blaster® X-Fi Platinum with Boston Acoustics digitals and sub-woofer.

You can use the rear mini-jack (on the card) for headphones, but it's far more convenient with the Audigy 2 front drive bay that I have.

I note into the options in the card control panel, there is a checkbox for "automatically detect headphones", but i cant discover how it works.

I am making the same as before, i plug the headphones into the 2 rear speakers jack, but it has a problem.

The 3D positional audio is inverted, because it is the rear outlet, normally, when you look at a noisy thing, you have a higer volume than when you have this thing at your back..... but as the headphones are conected to the rear oulet, then a crew spech sound as more volume when it is at my back :rotfl: .

I cant believe the designers and builders dont put a dedicated jack for headphones in a expensive card.

I buyed an "Y" connector plug to put the headphones in parallel with the front speakers, but :damn: , when i do it, i lose my front right speaker, i cant understand....

speakers
 

I have the Audigy 2 ZS sound card also....but I am running just your plain run of the mill creative speakers with sub woofer.....is there that much of a difference when going to a digital speaker?

I have never had a pci sound card, only use the internal ones. Right now I have a Abit KN8 SLI motherboard. Is there a notisable difference in sound?

I never used digital conection.... may it is more clear of parasit noises. Some times i pick-up a radio station in the speakers.
May be some bocy can help.



My onboard SoundMax woks fine with no sound bugs, but takes lot of CPU resources, and the 3D positional audio is not noticeable.

With the SB ExtremeMusic, i have no noticeable bugs, more FPS, and the 3D positional auduio is very noticeable.

Okay, thanks. :up: I have to check this out.

digital or analog??
 

Ok...I am a little confused here....maybe you AV gurus can help me out...I have the Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS gamers sound card...I also have the Klipsch2.1 pro media speakers....2 satellites with sub.....when I try and plug into the digital out jack on the sound card...I get nothing but static...it seems it will only work on the analog jack....I thought these were digital speakers....am I wrong?? Why wont it work out of the digital jack??

Well, today i experienced the first bug on the Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic.

This bug was reported for another users in the past, i was submerged and i can hear the storm wind sound.

Plus the 3D positional audio is too exagerated, all things at my back has a very very low volume, it is very anoying.

me too
 

I had that same issue once....I disabled or turned down the acceleration and it was fine after that.....

Are you talking about the sound of the storm wind when submergrd ?

Or the 3D positional audio ?

The wind and sea gulls when submerged.....although I am now experiencing the spatial thing ....although I thought it was just normal.....

Im using an AVLabs Audacity AVL300D and SH3 sounds fantastic with my Logitech z680's :). This sound card uses Dolby Digital Live technology which is something the Creative cards dont have.

Dolby Digital Live (DDL) is a real-time encoding technology for interactive media such as video games. It converts any audio signals on a PC or game console into the 5.1-channel Dolby Digital format and transports it via a single S/PDIF cable.

If you want to know what Dolby Digital Live is and find out what you have been missing out on all this time you can read up about it here: http://www.dolby.com/consumer/techno...olby_live.html

Also Turtle Beach and Auzentech make Dolby Digital Live sound cards to. Im waiting patiently for the new AuzenTech HDA X-Meridian 7.1 to be released and I will be upgrading to this sound card. As this sound card will have it all :).

Interesting job....

I was having a problem, if i want to have the headphones without to unplug the speakers, i was enforced to use 4.1 channels( or 5.1...or more) to plug in the headphones into the rear speakers out.

But SH3 doesnt works fine in 4.1 or more, it works better in 2.1, so i need to plug and unplug the headphones.

In this web page, the autor discover the pins assignement to connect the headphones directly to the sound board, into the connectors used for the frontal pannel.

may be interesting for some body, the job is for an Audigy card, but i tested it on a X-Fi XtremeMusic and works fine....

http://audigy2zshowto.blogspot.com/

Redwine, I dont think this has anything to do with your soundcard. It has happened to me too a couple of times, and I suspect it sometimes occur if you minimize the game to check some mail or whatever.

Oh, and I am still using onboard realtek sound.

I dont experienced it any more, may be due to an extensive use of the game testing mods, without rebbot, may be a fragmented memory....

I need to reboot the PC after play 2 or 3 missions if not the game hangs up when load the mission..... i have 3Gb RAM for that, but no way.... SH3 seems to eats my memory.:hmm:

I'm using these speakers:

http://www.alteclansing.com/product_...ountry_code=au

....and this card:

SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum

It sounds great.....also has front connection for headphones.

Both the speaker set AND the soundcard have remotes, which seesm a tad extreme.

As for the problem with the 3D positional thing, I had that too. I went in and checked my sound device setup and changed it and had no further probs. Can't remember what I changed, sorry!

My XFi-Platinum works just fine on my Nforce4-based ASUS A8N-SLI Premium. The XFi crackling problem is a 1% problem - it affects no more than 1% of users - but it got so much bad press because of Creative's dominance of this market segment. Some motherboard manufacturers who used the Nforce4 chipset made BIOS fixes that sorted the problem after consultation with Creative. Nforce4-based motherboards do seem to figure more heavily among people complaining of popping but since it's the most popular chipset for gamers I don't think that's necessarily surprising. The problem is certainly not exclusive to the NForce4.
Well done, that man! One reason I hardly ever go to the Creative forums anymore is the sheer number of idiots trying to drive their cheap and nasty 5.1 speakers with everything turned up to 100% and then blaming Creative for the clipping (distortion) they've induced.
I'll second that. That's exactly the reason I bought my Altec Lansing 630s.
That, my friends, is why I have a dual-core CPU. I never have to disable anything to run SH3 (or any other game).