Anyone use Audigy 2 ZS /w Vista Home Premium 32bit?

[Shiggity]

If anyone uses that card with stated OS, please send me a PM.

I am having endless problems atm. :bang head

The software won't install and run properly, creative has horrible vista support, I get massive cracking and popping whenever my speakers are on.

I'm re-installing XP tonight to see if that fixes it, but I am interested if anyone has this card and has it working with the vista version I have.

Thanks

~Shig

[Shiggity]

Ok so I did a clean install of XP, all the drivers went in correctly. Still popping and crackling!

I have to have a loose connection somewhere but I can't find it for the life of me. Might just say the hell with it and buy z5500 + x-fi card.

I got over 4 years of use out of my sound card and speakers, might be time to put the old girls down.

Any thoughts are welcome.

Edit - This is extra perplexing because 3 weeks ago the card and speakers worked perfectly in my last rig.

[AngryArtichoke]

The crackling and popping might be due to your PCI latency. If theres any way to adjust the latency through creative's CP or in BIOS, I'd suggest looking into it.
More info here:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=116382

[Shiggity]

The crackling and popping might be due to your PCI latency. If theres any way to adjust the latency through creative's CP or in BIOS, I'd suggest looking into it.
More info here:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=116382

Thank you for your help.

I found out some good stuff.

Using PCI Latency tool 3 (http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951) I was able to easily change my sound card PCI latency, which had not been set at all. The Abit IP35 PRO has no way of changing PCI latency in the bio so that part made sense.

I ended up trying a whole bunch of different settings (16,32,64,128). All of them made the crackling and popping go away when no sound was playing, but my right speaker was still having issues while I was playing a game or music. Well after trying out different speakers I found out that there is a bad connection on my subwoofer and pretty much no way to fix that without dismantling the entire thing, which I don't plan on doing.

However I found this to be extremely important information because some BIOS do not provide you with PCI latency adjustments. You end up with unset or default latencies that run too low for a soundblaster card. Many x-fi users were reporting crackling and popping too, but after re-setting their PCI latencies higher, the problem went away.

I should also note that if you are using an AGP video card you will want to keep a 2:1 ratio between latencies. (If video card is set at 128, sound should be 64, etc). If you have a PCI-E graphics card, which most people do now, it doesn't matter.

Most of this information was gathered with the above link and from http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?&threadid=121190.