The OC Forums HDA Mystique 7.1 Gold Thread

twEEkerAreUs said:

Awesome to hear! Yeah I am going to pick this up as soon as I can, did you pick it up from Newegg or is there another place that has a better deal?

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Yeh NewEgg Also.....

Again reviving an old thread but I wanted to chime in.


I recently purchased the XMystique as well to replace the hole that was left in the wake of replacing my nFroce2 MB. I was hopeing that the move to an nForce4 board was not going to be that great but, alas.

Personally, I do very much enjoy having this card and have only run into one specific problem with it while playing World of Warcraft. Apparently with the latest drivers, there is a buffer issue that causes pops and corrupted sound out of some of the environmental effects. I toyed with the settings but no change. I did revert back to the original drivers and now the problem has not surfaced again. Hopefully the next driver update will take care of that matter.

As far as I am concerned, this card is much better than the Creative Audigy cards. The main reason why I purchased the card in the first place was to get Dolby Digital Live Encoding directly to my Yamaha Home Theather 5.1 system (Model # escapes me right now) and it fits the bill quite lovely.

I am interested in getting feed back from other users as well to get a better idea of other issues or problems with the current drivers so we have a resource available.

Well I still have the bug where by the Windows speaker settings are not kept upon a restart.

I often go in to the speaker settings and see that they are set to desktop or 7.1 speakers, when I have 5.1 speakers...

And after having the card a fair few months now, I have to say that I don't like the 5.1 encoding for things like .wmv movies or mpegs. All stereo effects that were once present are completely lost in DD 5.1, virtually all sound comes from the center channel. (By that I mean the same sound seems to come from all speakers, but mostly from the center as it's volume is higher).

The 5.1 upmixing of a DVD is similar, very little definition from each channel, good job I have an external decoder, so I use the pass-through SPDIF.

However, I love playing music and games with the card, sounds great.

But there are still issues to be resolved.

EDIT: Oh yes, I can't believe I forgot to mention this, I get serious, and I mean serious stuttering in my DVD playback using the SPDIF pass through with DVD movies.
Every 5-10 seconds the sound will pop and the decoder will loose the signal for half a second then come back. It's seroiusly annoying, I tried using the optical and co-axial, but they're both the same.

Sometimes if I disable my McAfee anti-virus completely, the problem will clear up for about 20 mins before returning and then dissappearing again, so it must be a software problem. It's seriously annoying....

Interesting......


I have yet to install my DVD player software and test DVD playback. I personally always use the pass-thru option when playing DVDs to my external reciever simply because that is what the receiver is designed to do. Using the CPU/Soundcard to decode the audio stream from a DVD is (IMO) a waste of resources and decrease in quality. I also use the ATI DVD player because I have had the best luck using it and configuring it, not to mention that it supports hardware decoding with my video card. Will have to test that out and see it I get the same results.

Currently because I am running the original drivers, I get very little sound out of my center speaker but I know that is a driver bug (apparently they over-did it in the latest driver from what you have been saying Voodoo).

Did anyone get an forum account on Hidiaudio.com in order to see and reply to the support forums there? Since I use Hotmail, I cant seem to get the email address to send them a request to get on the forums. Would love to help out in making the drivers that much better

At least I have not experienced one BSoD or crash due to sound issues in using this card. That bugged the living h3ll out of me with my old Audigy card

FireFox said:

At least I have not experienced one BSoD or crash due to sound issues in using this card. That bugged the living h3ll out of me with my old Audigy card

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Yeh, big time. My Audigy did the same almost everyday.

And I agree, always use the SPDIF pass through, despite the fact that the card does a less than acceptable job upmixing to 5.1, I would never use it for the reasons you mentioned.
Just annoys me that the card doesn't do a good job at what it says it's designed to do. Sure it may make your external DD decoder recognize the signal as DD, but it doesn't do a whole lot of processing on the signal as there is no definition what so ever.

But for music and games, like i mentioned, it's great.

I might check out the forum you mentioned, see we can see what to expect in more driver releases...

it isnt actually a problem as such, rather a mis-configuration on the drivers part. It used to happen with certain drivers for hte soundstorm aswell. when you run in 5.1 or turned DICE on the majority of the front soundstage was played thru the center speaker.

The problem with stereo sources being played thru the center speaker can actually be solved if you use an ASIO plugin for your music player - i do it with foobar2000 and it works fine with DDLIVE which is absolute proof its not an encoding problem, but a simple driver error which im sure is easily solved

5.1 mixing of other sources are perfectly fine for me - are you sure you have everything configured correctly?

Yup, everything is perfect, I mean, what is there to configure?

What i'm talking about is if you play a DVD with the SPDIF disabled, and let the Mystique do the DD encoding, it doesn't sound remotely as good as if you enable the SPDIF pass through to an external decoder.

I just think the Mystique does a shoddy job in that repect. I use PowerDVD with the SPDIF pass through and its great. but if you enable the 2 speaker output in PowerDVD and let the card do the encoding, it's no-where near the same...

that's what i mean tho - i've pitched DDLive, DD passthru and 6 channel analogue against each other (all connected to my yamaha) and there isnt a huge difference on my setup.

I just think the Mystique does a shoddy job in that repect. I use PowerDVD with the SPDIF pass through and its great. but if you enable the 2 speaker output in PowerDVD and let the card do the encoding, it's no-where near the same...

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That's a typo, right? you need to card and whatever software your using configured as 6 channels (5.1) or more otherwise all your doing is upmixing 2 channel stereo to 5.1 - we all know that sucks

Ah, the problem surfaces.

I knew, i really did know that there was something up with that 2 speaker setup, that wasn't a typo.



These are the only options I have so i assumed the Mystique could only upmix from a stereo source....
I remember seeing 6 speakers before, but I seem to have lost that option.

I don't want to spend $25 getting an audio pack, i'll see what other options are available.

Thanks.

The option for 6 speakers is only available with power dvd if you have paid for it if my memory is correct

Try media player classic with the ac3filter codec. that shoudl do it all, and for free

Long time no speak james

Well, I just got PowerDVD 6 and I have all the audio options available.

And the DD Live, sounds.... great.

And there I was trying to upmix from stereo, I thought that DD Live worked much the same way that Pro-Logic worked, deriving the surround channels from a stereo source.

Well, the 6-channel option is great and like you said James, I reckon i wouldn't be able to tell the difference either.

There we go. Common you cant deny it - these cards rock!

eidt: hi chris, how you doing?

James can you add me on msn mate...

Edit:

my addy is inv*[email protected]

put an i where the asterisk is...

just dint want it to be used by farming/fishing companies

Damn..i havent been on these forums in ages... i really need to change my sig :weird:

give me a week. im going aboad on tuesday, and right now my bed is calling

Off to tenerife i go, la la la la la

ps, x-mystique rocks.

I really need some quick guidance james

im not man for guidance, however you're on the right forums

Glad to hear that you figured out what was up with your audio problem there Voodoo. Did you figure out what was going on with your SPDIF pass-thru "poping" problem?

I did go home and test the pass-thru on my own system using the ATI DVD software (v9.08) with DD and DTS pass-thur; not a single problem.

It must have been one of the settings were out of place.

Have to say that I am still waiting for the next driver release so we can get more definition in the surrounds sound and (hopefully) more support for 3d games.

what do you mean by more definition with surround sound and more support?