Hello.
New Sirocco user, just set up and seemingly working on my VISTA computer.
Driver version 1.0.48.33.
Firmware is listed as the latest. (Aaron flashed this for me before shipping).
All seems basically OK, with the only exception being that Dynamic Switching seems completely unusable. When I disconnect my bridge, little bursts of sound sometimes do and sometimes do not come out of my computer speakers in random packets. That's OK. I don't need dynamic switching.
However, even if I don't want to use DYNAMIC switching, I still want automatic switching. In other words, I would have the expectation that when I disconnect from the Sirocco, the control panel should automatically reset my default sound output to the device listed in the drop-down on the "Advanced Settings" screen. This does not happen however. When I disconnect the Sirocco, I then have to right-click on my system tray volume icon, select "Playback devices", scroll down to find my sound card in the now very large list of virtual devices, highlight it, hit set default, and close. This is a pain in the neck, and my understanding is that even if I need to stop and restart the player, the driver should handle this for me as I connect and disconnect.
Indeed, when I connect, if my computer sound card is set as default, it appears that the driver has no trouble setting itself as the default. So why doesn't it happen on the other end?
FYI - my native sound card (as listed in the drop down in the dialog you get when you press the "Advanced" button in the "Audio Link" tab of the control panel is:
"Speakers (Conexant High Definition Audio)"
Please advise.
-s
No chipset info I can see
Hi Aaron.
I got the previous information from the device manager, and there is no other information that I can decode as being Chipset-relevant.
There may be more
There may be more information in the Device Manager:
Start -> Control Panel -> Device Manager
Navigate to your wireless card and see if there is any chipset information. I'm checking specifically for an Intel chipset, however, and I'm not sure if they sell their wireless chipsets to makers of external wireless cards.
Not sure how to check what Chipset it is, but....
Hi Aaron -
On my XP machine, I do not know how to check the chipset. However, the device is the following:
Intersil PRISM Wireless LAN PCI Card
Network Driver: 1.07.29F
NIC Firmware: 1.04.01.00
If there is further information that would be of use to you, let me know how to get it....
Thanks!
Problem more on XP than VISTA
As I said previously, it is my XP computer that is showing the most flaky behavior. In the Device Manager, under the "Advanced" tab, the following properties are listed as configurable:
Adhoc Demo Mode
Authentication Algorithm
Fragmentation Threshold
Listen Interval
Power Save
Preamble Mode
RTS Threshold
The values of all these items is currently set to "Not Present".
If you have any thoughts, I would love to hear them...
I just realized that the
I just realized that the symptoms also match another known issue pertaining to a specific wireless chipset. Could you check which wireless chipset you have on the PC and let me know?
Hi Stephan, A couple of
Hi Stephan,
A couple of people have found this when using the new drivers on Vista. It seems to be a driver thing that happens on the odd PC, since I haven't heard of it happening on XP at all. You might want to check if there are some configurable parameters on your PC's wireless card, as any throughput limitations there would likely have this kind of effect.
New Driver -- hiccups in music playback?
Hi Aaron -
Not sure if this is a result of the Beta Driver or not since I didn't use the standard release one long enough to experience this. I am seeing two things, and seeing them both from Vista and from XP, but the problems are MUCH more intense when being driven from the XP machine.
The first is that I can be looking at the Wireless Audio Center and watching the buffering usage. I expect to hear some kind of sound glitch (and I do) in the rare events when the yellow line on the buffer graph plunges below the red line. But that is rare. It is stranger that I hear smaller but more frequent "hiccups" in the playback even when it appears that there is no buffering problem. Sounds kind of like a CD skip or something.
And, I don't know if this is related, but I tend to see that over time, less and less of the buffer is used. Like it starts at or close to 100% when I first connect. For the first several minutes, it will hover between 95% and 100% (except for sudden times when the computer or net resources force drastic buffer usage and it goes down to 50 or 20 or even zero, but that is rare, and if that happens, it typically recovers back to that 95-100% region). Then, some time later, it almost seems as if the ceiling for the buffer has been reduced, and it is hovering (for example) between 70 and 75%. Once this happens, it will NEVER go back up to 95% unless I disconnect and reconnect again. If I just keep playing and waiting, it might suddenly reset itself so that now the ceiling is at 60%. And, as you can imagine, as these ceilings go down, the incidents of hiccups or digital artifacts in the sound go up.
Can you offer some sense of whether I have something configured incorrectly, or whether this is just something that is part of your product?
THanks!
Yep, all of the 2.x series
Yep, all of the 2.x series of drivers are also XP-compatible. Actually, they work better on XP than they do on Vista, in my experience. As you suspect, the upgraded firmware will only work with the upgraded drivers, so the original Sirocco driver (from the CD) will not work.
Seems to work fine...
So far, after fairly simple testing, so good. No problems. The switch back to original primary device on disconnect seems to work flawlessly.
BTW, the dynamic switching, or what now seems to be called "Redirect Audio", seems to be just as jumbled and unusable as before, but I don't offer that as a complaint, just as information. I don't really need it.
One last question. My wife has an XP machine we would like to ramp up to be able to talk to this device. My sense is that the upgraded firmware will ONLY work with the upgraded driver, is that correct? Will the upgraded driver load and work properly on XP? And then we have an old Windows 98 kicker sitting around -- is there anything we can load on that which will allow us to talk to this device? I imagine not...
You'll want to uninstall and
You'll want to uninstall and re-install. Sorry for not making that clear.
Just to be sure
Do I install this right over my installation, or do I need to uninstall and then reinstall?
Hi Stephan, I don't have a
Hi Stephan,
I don't have a test machine open at the moment- do you remember which driver package you had downloaded? If it's 2.0.0, there are problems with the switching on that one. You might want to try out the newest beta (not on the driver page yet). Let me know your feedback, and hopefully we can make it an official release soon.
http://sondigo.com/productsupport/downloads/sirocco/beta/sirocco_2_6_bet...
Cheers,
Aaron