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Help and Support Forums => Technical Support => Topic started by: NHawk on January 24, 2008, 03:22:53 PM

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: NHawk on January 24, 2008, 03:22:53 PM

I just installed another 2 gig of ram and now my sounds are high pitched and distorted for some reason.

The only way I can stop this is to reduce the hardware acceleration to "Basic" in DxDiag.

Is this normal?

I have run memtest and the memory is good. There are no conflicts with the sound card IRQ.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: fuzeman on January 24, 2008, 06:23:22 PM

No help at all but I couldnt resist, you obviously didn't get the 'nonsqueaker ram.'

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: Skuzzy on January 25, 2008, 06:00:24 AM

That is an odd one.  What kind of sound card?  Check for a later driver perhaps?

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: NHawk on January 25, 2008, 06:04:43 AM

Actually if you can believe it,  it's even worse than a squeaker.

I tried changing drivers, the distortion is gone but then I lose the distance effect of the sound. Someone in a tank sounds like they are right on top of me, even if they are 3.5k away. Rolled back the drivers and the distortion is back.

It's an original SB Audigy. No pro, platinum, etc.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: Skuzzy on January 28, 2008, 06:40:25 AM

What speaker configuration?  Did you force EAX or any other type of sound processing?  I asusme this is all on an XP based computer.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: NHawk on January 28, 2008, 07:18:29 AM

All EAX setting are off.

Windows XP - SP2

4 Speakers - Set as Quadraphonic

No Dolby turned on that I can find. Except for selecting a 5.1 surround
sound speaker system, there's not even a setting for it.

I sent my DxDiag by email. The only thing not plugged in on that report is my CH stick.

The odd thing is that this started when I plugged in another 2Gig of memory running in Dual Channel. It's almost like the buss speed increased and because of that the card can't handle hardware processing. But I checked and the buss speed hasn't changed.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: Skuzzy on January 28, 2008, 07:38:10 AM

Do me a favor NHawk.  Set the speaker configuration for a basic 2 speaker config.  I think the 'Quadraphonic' is applying a spatial algorithm.

The screech is typical of some type of spatial sound mamangeament being applied.  It might not have been able to do so before, as the computer did not have enough free RAM and it was ignoring the setting.  Just a guess.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: NHawk on January 28, 2008, 07:59:51 AM

Same end result, 2-3k away from a running tank and they sound like they are right next to me.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: NHawk on January 28, 2008, 08:07:43 AM

The card is 6 years old, so I think it's time to give up on this problem and move on to new one. :)

I'm going to order the Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1 channel PCI Express sound card I mentioned in my email. Let's see if that works.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: Skuzzy on January 28, 2008, 08:27:50 AM

Very odd.  The games 3D sounds are calculated before it gets to the sound card.  The sound card is not responsible for the 3D effect.  DirectSounbd does that for the game.  The game simply notes the position of the sound in 3D space.

Now, under Vista, this all changes as Microsoft has eliminated DirectSound from Vista and uses the normal sound API for Windows istead.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: NHawk on January 28, 2008, 08:34:55 AM

I think it may be a problem with the hardware buffer. If I use the original drivers, that's where the problem seemed to start. All windows sounds were OK, with standard acceleration. When I'd enter AH, that's where the screech would start happening.

If I went back to dxdiag after being in AH and tested it then, software buffers would work but hardware would not. Reboot and all was fine until I entered AH again.

Change to the latest drivers and all seems to work except for the volume  problem.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: NHawk on January 28, 2008, 10:56:14 AM

I decided to give this one more try before ordering the new sound card.

I completely stripped the Audigy drivers from my system so there was no trace of them at all. I then re-installed the original drivers. The card won't even pass the DxDiag tests when it hits the hardware acceleration.

So, the new card is ordered. We'll see how that goes.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: Skuzzy on January 28, 2008, 11:45:15 AM

Been a while snce I have seen a sound card go bad, but it can happen.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: Thruster on January 30, 2008, 08:09:24 AM

I ran into the same issue with my new system. After I reduced hardware accel to the lowest settings the artifacts and screech went away but my vox was heavily distorted. I had some multiple devices in my hardware profile so I deleted them but now I've lost vox. All game sounds including incoming vox are fine but it does seem that I can hear external sounds more readily and explosions have a different timbre sometimes.

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: splitatom on January 30, 2008, 07:54:06 PM

check the speaker cables and the speakers

Title: Sounds are high pitched and distorted
Post by: Thruster on January 31, 2008, 01:23:54 PM

Neither are likely to produce these issues.