Nasty surround sound issue.

I got myself a new PC today. Brand new package deal, comes with everything, including an ACTUAL sound card, which is something I'd been missing for years. You'd think this would be a great thing, a massive step up from the motherboard audio card I had before. Well, either I have NO idea what I'm doing, or something is seriously wrong here, because my sound quality has actually gone DOWN. Let me explain.

Before, I had some kind of Realtek on-board audio card that came with its own controller and a set of pretty simplistic controls, but the sound was relatively good and 3D surround sound was accurate. I run a 5.1 speaker setup, so it's easy to tell. However, my new PC came with a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio card, and as soon as I ran it, I remembered an age-old problem I've had with Creative audio cards - their stereo is front-loaded. Back in the old days of Half-Life 2, I had to be facing Dr. Kleiner directly, or I would barely here him speak, and as soon as I turned my back on him, I'd hear nothing. With Realtek, this wasn't the case. With X-Fi, it once again is.

I tested this with a Portal Corp portal in City of Heroes. I trust we all know how annoyingly loud they are - you can hear them as far away as the the corridor. However, when I went right up to the portal and turned around, I lost ALL sound coming from it. All I could hear was the ambient rumbling which I'm pretty sure is either omnipresent or coming from the centre of the room. Bad.

Now, City of Heroes has a really weird take on 3D sound, using some kind of muting and dumbing effect on sounds not coming from dead centre, and turning this off removes ALL stereo and surround, so I've had to keep it on. I've additionally activated some weird options on X-Fi that I've never heard about before, called "X-Fi CMSS-3D" and "X-Fi Crystalizer" and that seems to have taken care of SOME of the oddities, but... Not all. The 3D thingy, when activated, does allow me to hear things "behind" my camera better, but still more muted and I'm pretty sure it does NOT allow me to hear things right directly behind me, as I'm unable to hear the "whoosh" you get when, say, switching from Hover to Fly. And whatever that Crystalizer did, I'm still missing most of the "punch" in my punches, specifically Energy Melee, that I used to have before. With Realek, they sounded like slaps. With X-Fi, they sound like parade drums.

I'm really not sure what I'm doing wrong and I'm not even sure things are wrong now, as I may have been hearing wrong before. I've no way to test it, however, as the Creative console has no means to test surround other than having a cute female voice narrate my channels. The Realtek control centre had this test where I could move a buzzing ball around my "head" in 3D and would play audio accordingly, letting me test my surround thoroughly, but Creative does not have that, and I'm completely unable to find a programme to do that on the 'net. If anyone knows of a good programme to do that, or at least a good way to test it that doesn't consist of "just play some Doulby Surround DVD," I would be very thankful.

In general, though, if anyone has any idea how I can set this... This THING up so that it plays proper surround with the correct sounds, I would really appreciate it. The thing is, I'm not sure what settings my Realtek setup had before, and it may very well have imposed some heavy filters I had no control over, so any help at all is appreciated.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm in exactly the same boat, and have been for some time now. I wasn't aware that Creative cards were front-loaded, but that explains a lot. I've never had really true 5.1 surround sound with the Creative card (despite the supposed capability to support it), and CoH just makes the matter worse.

I can't say I have any solutions for you, but I will definitely lurk here for someone that does... and let you know if I find anything.

Well, I can't say if they're designed to be front-loaded, but that has been my experience with them when I used them back a few years ago. It got to the point where I aggressively disabled any and all 3D sound because it made me flatly unable to hear half the sound in most games. I'd thought it was just better technology when I stopped hearing that, but it seems it was just me switching to a PC with an on-board sound card.

I did find a special 3D sound option in this card that allows me to pick a balance point between Centre and Surround, which helps somewhat, but the problem is that even surround still seems to be slated heavily towards sound coming from the front over sound coming from the rear. Plus, I can control the volume of my centre and my surround separately from the physical controls on my speakers.

I need to find out what this thing really does.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

[ QUOTE ]
I got myself a new PC today. Brand new package deal, comes with everything, including an ACTUAL sound card, which is something I'd been missing for years. You'd think this would be a great thing, a massive step up from the motherboard audio card I had before. Well, either I have NO idea what I'm doing, or something is seriously wrong here, because my sound quality has actually gone DOWN. Let me explain.

Before, I had some kind of Realtek on-board audio card that came with its own controller and a set of pretty simplistic controls, but the sound was relatively good and 3D surround sound was accurate. I run a 5.1 speaker setup, so it's easy to tell. However, my new PC came with a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio card, and as soon as I ran it, I remembered an age-old problem I've had with Creative audio cards - their stereo is front-loaded. Back in the old days of Half-Life 2, I had to be facing Dr. Kleiner directly, or I would barely here him speak, and as soon as I turned my back on him, I'd hear nothing. With Realtek, this wasn't the case. With X-Fi, it once again is.

I tested this with a Portal Corp portal in City of Heroes. I trust we all know how annoyingly loud they are - you can hear them as far away as the the corridor. However, when I went right up to the portal and turned around, I lost ALL sound coming from it. All I could hear was the ambient rumbling which I'm pretty sure is either omnipresent or coming from the centre of the room. Bad.

Now, City of Heroes has a really weird take on 3D sound, using some kind of muting and dumbing effect on sounds not coming from dead centre, and turning this off removes ALL stereo and surround, so I've had to keep it on. I've additionally activated some weird options on X-Fi that I've never heard about before, called "X-Fi CMSS-3D" and "X-Fi Crystalizer" and that seems to have taken care of SOME of the oddities, but... Not all. The 3D thingy, when activated, does allow me to hear things "behind" my camera better, but still more muted and I'm pretty sure it does NOT allow me to hear things right directly behind me, as I'm unable to hear the "whoosh" you get when, say, switching from Hover to Fly. And whatever that Crystalizer did, I'm still missing most of the "punch" in my punches, specifically Energy Melee, that I used to have before. With Realek, they sounded like slaps. With X-Fi, they sound like parade drums.

I'm really not sure what I'm doing wrong and I'm not even sure things are wrong now, as I may have been hearing wrong before. I've no way to test it, however, as the Creative console has no means to test surround other than having a cute female voice narrate my channels. The Realtek control centre had this test where I could move a buzzing ball around my "head" in 3D and would play audio accordingly, letting me test my surround thoroughly, but Creative does not have that, and I'm completely unable to find a programme to do that on the 'net. If anyone knows of a good programme to do that, or at least a good way to test it that doesn't consist of "just play some Doulby Surround DVD," I would be very thankful.

In general, though, if anyone has any idea how I can set this... This THING up so that it plays proper surround with the correct sounds, I would really appreciate it. The thing is, I'm not sure what settings my Realtek setup had before, and it may very well have imposed some heavy filters I had no control over, so any help at all is appreciated.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, I know they're listed on the CoH website; but (imo) X-FI cards suck the big one when it comes to CoX. You may want to DL the latested X-Fi drivers (and be SURE you get the right ones as there are plenty of types of X-Fi cards, and the X-Fi drivers aren't unified, so you need to be sure you have the right one for your X-Fi card type.

Up until the latest X-Fi drivers on mine (the 'Extreme Music' version); I couldn't play ANY MMO (CoH, WoW, etc.) for more than an hour before I'd get the high pitched 'whine of death' (just a high pitched screech from the card - didn't crash the PC or the game, just rattled my teeth. Creative TRIED to claim this was a motherboard issue with ALL NVidia based MBs UNTIL people running AESUS, Trend-Micro abnd a variety of other MBs reported the same behavior. But, after over 18 months; it looks like they finally had a driver that fixed the issue.

There WAS a time when Creative was the 'king of sound'; their drivers worked, and they were compatible with everything; but that stopped and they started going downhill when teh SB Live! line was introduced. I know I'll now NEVER get another Craetive soundcard for future PCs I build.

Well, I looked for a driver for the thing, but there was only one on Creative's site, and it was from 2008 at some point. I assumed that's the one I had already, because the PC came with SOMETHING installed for the card. I could try reinstalling and see how that goes, but it seems to me that creative and their drivers is always a big mess. I've never had an easy time finding and installing drivers for a Sound Blaster, aside from the times I've had other people do it for me, and Lord knows how much trouble they had.

I'll see about finding some new drivers. The bad thing is that now I can't even use my on-board sound card, because it doesn't appear to have been installed

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Well, I found a very big part of my problem. Stupid "Stereo Xpand" was doing more than just adding stereo to the game, it was muting and modulating my sound, I suppose to make it "more punchy." Bleh!

I noticed it just today, listening to music. If anyone's familiar with Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, where the singer sings "when the city sleeps and I'm the only one and..." his voice gets hideously muted, because that's where drums start playing, making my sound card think it needs to mute because it's not a "punchy" place that needs to be "emphasised." That's somewhere after 3:08 on the link.

Simply disabling Creative Control Panel stereo seems to have fixed the problem, but since I actually WANT stereo, I'll see if the simpler option will provide it without messing with my sound quality.

Stupid make-belief progress! This is like the "everything's better with bloom" of audio. Eh!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Are you running Vista or XP?

There were significant changes in the way 3d sound is handled in Vista vs. XP. Creative sound cards have a work around for the changes in Vista. Creative Labs ALchemy will help some with restoring accptable 3d sound in CoH.

On the down side I have had issues with it locking up the game on exit when enabled. To date I have had no luck in figuring out how to stop that.

XP for the moment, and from the looks of it, I won't get to use Vista at all. I hear Windows 7 is being released soon, and with a brand new machine from the day before yesterday, I don't foresee myself doing a fresh re-install any time soon.

Switching to good old stereo seems to have fixed the problem, though. I'll make a mental note to keep all the fancy Creative options OFF from now on.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.