Hey,
I have owned the Inferno for about a year now with no major problems. All of a sudden yesterday, I started noticing crackling from my speakers. I went into the C-media Control panel and unchecked the CD-recording button and the crackling went away. I use that CD control for my other TV tuner which connects via cable to the Inferno and have had no issues with it. I cannot pinpoint anything that would have caused this crackling and I have the 8/30/07 drivers installed (I tried a reinstall already). I also tried switching the cable from the CD input to the other one (line-in/aux), but get the same strange static. I also tried changing the Dolby Live to something else and tried fiddling options on my Z-5500's. I doubt it is a hardware problem because nothing really has changed from 2 days ago til yesterday, but my guess is there is some driver or other option that is causing this strange static. Just to make it clear, there is no problem with the sound unless one of the recording modes is ON, and there is no IRQ sharing with the sound card. I am stumped - maybe the cable suddenly "blew" - but I don't know!
HELP, please!
As a followup, I decided to
As a followup, I decided to see what would happen on a clean copy of XP, so I did a fresh install on another partition and got the same result - static. So either it somehow is a bad card or it is more simply a bad cable. Strange that it happens all of a sudden, but I guess I now know it is not a driver/settings issue.
Thoughts?
You can test the cable
You can test the cable hypothesis by wiggling the cable while the recording is happening. If you can initiate the crackling this way, that's likely the culprit.
Aaron - you replied before I
Aaron - you replied before I got a chance to! Yeah, so I removed the cable and then tried turning on the "monitoring" (and unmuting) of Line-in, CD, etc and STILL got the static! As a test for the cable, I went into the BIOS and reinstated my onboard sound - and tested the cable with my TV card and it checks out fine. So I have now eliminated the OS and the cable from possible causes, and I am left with either the card itself or possibly a driver issue - although I tried reverting back to my old driver to see what that would do (nada).
I made sure the Inferno is in the slot properly, so now the only thing I can think of to do is to try it out in another setup. Moving it to another slot won't help because my only free PCI slot has managed to cause random freezing with everything I've put in there - possibly IRQ related. Anyway, everything had been working just fine and nothing hardware related has been changed until I messed around with the cable. I had used my TV tuner with the cable attached to the Inferno 2 days ago and everything was fine - but now just static and crackling - and no sound from the tuner (with the Inferno). Basically, when you click "ON" any of the Recording inputs, you see the sound "meter" on the left moving around with the static it produces - which it never did before. But when you leave everything Recording-related off, the main volume is fine and there is no static! Right now I will use my onboard sound for the TV tuner/cable, and the Inferno for everything else, but as you can see it is quite vexing!
If one determines the problem is the card itself, what can I do from here in terms of getting a replacement? Not really what I want, but there is definitely something wrong here.
Thanks in advance for your help, Aaron!
If you do have a chance to
If you do have a chance to try the Inferno in another system, definitely give that a try. It should let us know 100% whether the hardware is faulty. At this point it could still be a software conflict on this PC.
I don't have another system
I don't have another system at my disposal to test it on, and it is not a software problem since I did do a clean install of XP on another partition and got the same issue. Not sure what to do! Thanks!
Sorry, I was under the
Sorry, I was under the impression that you had another machine to test with. Have you tried any other PCI cards on this slot? Since you are having problems with your other slot, there's a possibility that this one is problematic as well.
Also, have you tried the cable card with any other sound devices? The problem could be on the cable card as well, especially since you are getting the crackling on both of the Inferno's pin inputs.
Oh ya, well I was just
Oh ya, well I was just postulating about trying the card out with another system. It was just a freak thing since it HAD been working flawlessly up until a few days ago, and I cannot completely rule out the PCI slot giving trouble, but the sound is flawless except in recording mode.
I did mention it above, but I have the TV card hooked up currently to my onboard sound and that turns out to be just fine. I almost don't even care about the recording thing not working right (I said almost) because when I want to hear the other card, I just switch the output on my Z5500s to Analog (from Optical Dolby Live with the Inferno), and there it goes. Good enough for now, but I am still hoping to resolve the underlying issue at some point.
Sorry, I missed the part
Sorry, I missed the part about connecting it to the onboard sound already.
Based on your information it seems quite unlikely that the driver is at fault, but it is still worth a shot. Try uninstalling the 20070830 driver and installing the original one (from CD). See if that changes the behavior.
Oooh, I just did a massive
Oooh, I just did a massive cleanup, and I have absolutely where my CD is - so you don't by any chance know if the necessary files are online somewhere? It's worth a shot, but I am actually using the 12/22/06 drivers that you posted elsewhere on this forum. I find that these allow me to keep the Dolby Live output constant by monitoring/unmuting the SPDIF input (under recording) which is grayed out and won't cause any static. Before this all happened, I was monitoring the CD-in recording, and that gave the Z5500's the constant signal, but now that would result in static! I wish there was a setting for us Z5500 users that would keep the signal always there without having to either use the System tray program or flip on a recording option. For some reason the 8/2007 driver with SPDIF input monitoring on, won't show the same ON result on my Z5500's - either its a bug or by design. Without keeping the signal constant, there is a delay for all audio which usually results in not hearing the really short but OH SO IMPORTANT (lol) Windows sounds! I know I went off on a tangent, but I had to say something as it seems like many if not all of us Z5500 users with Digital output lose the signal unless we mess around with the settings a bit.
I believe what you are
I believe what you are referring to is a "keep alive" issue. The delay on short sounds is coming from your receiver switching into Dolby Digital decode mode. This delay is very short to non-existent on some receivers, on others it's greater. The reason that you don't hear this with certain drivers is because they have a Dolby Digital "keep alive" function, which keeps the SPDIF output in DD format all of the time to prevent the drops.
The original Inferno driver, in case you want to try it, is here:
http://sondigo.com/drivers
Well none of the drivers
Well none of the drivers that I have tried would keep the DD alive by default; I had to activate a recording mode. If the 2006 driver was the original, then I have already tested that and confirmed that it does not fix the problem.
Interesting, I'm pretty sure
Interesting, I'm pretty sure most of the Inferno drivers do have keep-alive. It's possible that your Z5500's are "sleeping" the DD decoding until it receives a non-zero signal, although that would be pretty unusual.