Audigy zs Notebook, what is supported?

samplehunter

Hi all,

I've just bought this card for my laptop and installed the creative crap's drivers.
I wanted to have a sp/dif in and out. Unfortunately the drivers are a bit , ahem, restricted with SCMS stuff.
So I thought about installing the kx drivers instead. So I was asking which of the capabilities are supported and how stable the drivers work.

Can I use the digital in/out with the kx drivers? without SCMS?
Are all of the inputs/outputs supported with ASIO / in standard Win driver mode?
How good is the deinstallation routine from the creative drivers or is there any clean uninstall tool for the CL drivers?

What are your experiences with this card and kx drivers? any glitches?

I use the kx drivers with my SB Live at home already and i find, it's pretty cool that you can program the Emu-DSP directly. Is this possible with the Audigy zs notebook too? Would be great cause i could use it as a FX Processor on stage...

CRFX

I just got the notebook SB as well, works great with KX. The dsp works the same as all the rest of the desktop cards with all the great plugins.
Althogh I saw in the knowledgebase, "spdif not working". I'll check tomorow if I can get anything out of it. Another limitation I can't get around is the analog side channels for 7.1 don't work.
If you're really desprate for a spdif out you could get a cheap usb sound card with spdif and use Velbac, a program that will use KX's asio outs and send them to any other sound card with a small delay.
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/audio-ge...soundcard.html

*edit
optical spdif output works, I don't have a way to test input though.

samplehunter

Hi,
Finally i've installed 3538m on my Samsung Q35.

First i've deinstalled all creative software, drivers, reg entries.
The install of the kx drivers was quite flawless but all dsp effects which used XTRAM had terrible aliasing noise. So the reverbs, delays chorus and some other were not usable first. The short Delay with ITRAM and the comressors sounded fine instead.
I figured out, that the problem was a BIOS setting for the Core2Duo which saves extra battery power by setting the CPU in HLT mode when idle. This caused problems with memory access timing which is essential when needed in realtime as by the Audigy accessing XTRAM. As i switched this feature off in the BIOS, everything sounded fine.

So i've tested what's possible with the card.

normal WinMM Playback and recording works
SPDIF out is a copy of the front out
SPDIF in is routed to CD-SPDIF in. works too.

The installed WDM devices were Wave 0/1, Wave 4/5, Wave 6/7, Wave 8/9
The Wave HQ device was not installed, so it seems i've no 24/96 playback or recording.

I tried to get bit-by-bit playback and recording. So i connected Wavegen 3.0 square out to k2lt and set a 1500Hz Squarewave @ -6dB and routed it to the SPDIF out which was set to 48kHz. I recorded the signal with my DAT Recorder.
Then i set the direct SPDIF recording to CD SPDIF, played back the DAT and recorded the signal with Wavelab @48kHz.

Well, it was not even close to bit identical. the edges of the sqarewave showed me that there clearly a sinc-interpolation has been used, which is strange because the whole signal path was 16/48 with no filters loaded.
I tried the same with dirac pulses (one sample of value 1.0, all other samples digital zero) and the dirac got processed the same way. now i have the impulse response of the interpolator but i wanted to have a dirac again .

My first enthusiastic try was to "store" a text file over SPDIF and "read" it back. Didn't work you might guess. Data files don't like audio interpolation.

AC3 seems not to work too: I connected my DVD Recorder, set it to ac3 bitstream out and first received the terrible bitstream noise. Then i checked the AC3 decode mode setting in kx Mixer and there was silence. when i stopped the DVD and switched it to the tuner, it delivered a 48k PCM stream which was played back regardless of the AC3 decode setting in kx Mixer. So it seems that AC3 decoding doesn't work for me.

Could it be that some features doesn't work if you deinstalled the creative drivers completely? from the CLReverb and EAXReverb i have read that you must have the proper DLLs installed to use it. Could it be that the same goes for AC3 decoding?

Oh, and the Mixer and DSP settings aren't recognized and afer a reboot they are replaced by a default setting. I saved my settings as kxdefault.kx in system32 but this was not the solution for that.

Eugene Gavrilov

I have never checked ac-3 stuff on the zsnb device. SPDIF bypass probably does not work, nor does ac-3 spdif-in decoding. AC-3 software decoding works fine (for me) - e.g. DVD playback.
--
the audio data is interpolated, this cannot turned off. at least, I don't know how.
--
XTRAM: yes, this may cause some issues. your hint with 'hlt' instruction is useful, if it is tweakable in your bios
--

samplehunter

Hi Eugene,

I have found that the XTRAM issue could also be solved with a freeware tool named "Rightmark CPU Clock Utility" This tool has a setting to run HLT Command while idle. Windows Taskmanager will show always 100% then, but the crackling seems to be gone without having to reboot and BIOS tweaking.

But I've found a ASIO Problem related to the kx-Mixer:
If the amplitude of the ASIO audiostream falls under a specific value, there is a pop-sound like that sound when you set the master-out to zero. if the amplitude goes higher than the "threshold" there is a pop again. quite annoying when playing a instrument with slow attack and release.
As i didn't have kx-Mixer in autostart i could figure out that there is no problem BEFORE kx-Mixer is loaded. Once loaded the Problem exists even if you unload kx-Mixer again.
This behaviour is identical in 3538m and 3539 which I've tried today.
Hope this helps you.

UPDATE: This strange "effect" seems to affect normal wave-out too. Try to generate a sine-wave with 10 Hz @ -72dB with a Audioprogram, then slide the Wave/PCM Fader slowly down and you will suddelnly hear 5 or 10 Pops per second This behaviour even "works" with the DSP:

Wavegen->sine out [-100dB,10Hz] -> StVol[1%] -> Epilog front out

SOLUTION: Mixing a bit noise @-100dB from Wavegen to epilog front out as a kind of "dither" solves the Problem.
Maybe this might solve the MIDI-Pop Problem too.