IYoung

Hi,

I have an Auzentech Prelude soundcard that has been making extremely loud popping & crackling noises for quite a long time. There have been many posts made on Auzentech's forums Forums | Auzentech Community about this, but I have a problem...
Last week I noticed that dozens of posts on their forums had been deleted regarding this and other matters. I thought that maybe I had somehow hidden posts or something so I made a post on their forums to say that posts were missing and what could I do to show them and.... kaboom... my forum account there has now been banned .

The reason for this post here is to;

1. See if anyone else has noticed the amount of missing stuff on their forums and know what's going on there?

2. Try and find a solution to the Prelude problem - I'm using their most current drivers under Win7 64bit, Gigabyte EX58 Extreme mobo, Intel Core I7 920.

Some guy in their forums tried creating a mixture of old and new drivers on their forums and claimed that it worked but it did nothing for the popping & crackling issue. Has anyone else here had the same problem and managed to fix it?

Tipstaff

You are not the only one noticing this. Of late they have been severely censoring their forums, getting rid of any complaints related to their cards (which apparently this all started about the time the X-Meridian 7.1 2G came out.. a NON Creative based card, btw), or rebate claims.

The only thing I can suggest at the moment is to do the standard tests.

- disconnect your cases front panel header from the sound card (the idea here is to isolate the card from the case as some cases can cause feedback if the wiring isn't up to par)
- turn off Turbo mode (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Creative Tech\20X\DriverSettings\Wave\Pin#00000002, and change Turbo from 1 to 0) (an old Creative Audigy 1/2/4/X-Fi trick)
- try grabbing some of the motherboard paper spacers, or even electrical tape, and use them/it to isolate the backplate on the card from the board itself (recommended more for those that have full metal jacks than for those that use a mix like the Prelude)
- turn off CMSS3D (gawd I hate thing.. cause so much feedback issues)
- mute all recording devices, including not only muting and disconnecting a mic, but unchecking the mic boost option

There are also things outside of the card itself you need to consider. Those are other parts in your system, specifically your power supply or another card inside (such as the graphics), even the motherboard, as well as stuff outside of the case, such as power source, power bar (cheap ones can cause issues), and other devices you hook up to the same power bar other than your PC as well as the wall outlet itself.

On top of what I mentioned above, a few other tests you can do is to try removing the current video card, and using either a less power hungry card, or even the onboard video if you have it. If the same issue happens try removing any non-essential PCI cards. If you are overclocking the system reset back to the defaults (this one thing can play havoc on PCI devices as the PCI bus gets overclocked too). USB devices. Unplug any you don't absolutely need (printers, joysticks, wireless network cards).

I should mention that I have an Azuntech X-Fi Forte 7.1, and was noticing crackling issues when I first bought the card. Just by doing the isolating trick with the paper spacers (had tons of them from my years of building computers) the crackling was reduced. That, along with the old Turbo disable, and moving my card away from the video card (the Forte is a PCIe card, and I was using the one above the video card... bad decision as it was getting damn hot) all did the trick.

Edit: One more thing. Although I don't know how much this will help, but you may want to force-disable the onboard audio codec. Go into your bios, and look for a listing called "Azalia Codec" under "Integrated Peripherals". By default the onboard audio is set to "Auto" in the bios. This setting can cause SOOO much problems, especially when adding in sound cards, or even video cards that have HDMI audio onboard. So, instead of Auto, set it to "Disable".

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IYoung

Thanks for the suggestions Tipstaff, I'll try them all out this weekend and see how I get on .

Tipstaff

Just a follow up as I forgot to mention two more things:

- You can try disabling C1E support in the bios (listed as CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E) in your bios) under Advanced CPU Features. While this didn't help with me it has helped others.

- In the same section, try disabling CPU EIST Function as well. This will disable CPU throttling, and it will run at the same speed all the time. Again this worked for others.

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