Very odd problem - C-Media soundcard

hohum

I recently bought a cheap new soundcard (C-Media 8738) to replace the old Crystal ISA soundcard in an old Pentium MMX system. Removed the old one completely (drivers then card), fitted the new one and installed the drivers from the cd (v636). It works great, and I was quite surprised at how good the audio quality is for such a cheap card. But whilst it works no problem device-wise, the sound is reversed! No matter what I try I cannot get it to playback audio through the correct channels. I use headphones, and have selected that in the audio control panel etc, but the left sound channel is always played through the right and vice versa.

At first I thought it was a driver issue, however after completely uninstalling the ones installed from the cd and trying a newer set downloaded from C-Media's site (v639), the problem is still there. It's a really annoying problem

Does anyone have any ideas? The sound channels are reversed in everything (cd playback, mp3 playback, games...) and there's no option anywhere to reverse the sound which would solve my problem. Can anyone help me out? This is under Windows 98SE by the way... any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

RIV@NVX

Hmmm... can't you just 'reverse' your headphones?

hohum

lol, no

Little update: Had an experiment with the various speaker settings and connections available on the card, here's what i've found (Front speaker socket = green, rear = black):

Headphones setting: Green = reversed sound, Black = disabled

2 speaker setting: Green = reversed sound, Black = disabled

4 speaker setting: Green = reversed sound, Black = correct :o

..but because the 4 speaker setting is designed for speakers, audio sounds a bit odd (very little bass) when using headphones. It's got me stumped...

RIV@NVX

Hmmm... perhaps your card is designed that way by hardware? What's the manafacturer of the actual card (not the chip)?

hohum

It doesn't say... brand new card (OEM), the only name mentioned everywhere is C-Media... absolutely no other maker apart from them mentioned on the box, in the manual, on the cd or the card itself... in fact the front of the little manual supplied just says 'User's Manual - CMedia CMI8738SX PCI Sound Card'

*shrugs*

I can make do with the 4 speaker/rear output workaround I guess, it just seems really daft to me.
I bet it's a godam Win98 bug i've discovered that can only be fixed by a complete reinstall of the o/s , might have to try it on my newer system which runs WinXP to test...

RIV@NVX

Yeah, that could be interesting.

Matth

The line of least resistance, would be to make a wired adapter from a stereo plug, a stereo line socket, and a small piece of screened twin cable.

I'm surprised you get satisfactory results anyway, most headphones are about 32 ohms, and the line-out often doesn't have enough grunt for that low an impedance.

hohum

Nah, there is no line out.. just line in, mic, front speaker, rear speaker. The front speaker socket is always reversed, so I have to enable something called xear3d in the driver control panel and use the rear speaker socket to fix it (although ironically it recommends I use the front speaker (green) socket instead...). By the way in response to my earlier post in this thread, changing o/s doesn't fix it - does exactly the same thing under win2000.

RIV@NVX

I don't know of any system-wide solution for that, but foobar2000 audio player offers a DSP called "Reverse stereo channels" which does what it says. You might try that, at least for MP3s etc.