[RESOLVED] "New" Sound Card Problem

i'm running xp on a gateway computer purchased in january of 2002. i have begun to experiment with fruity loops to create music. however, much of the sound is distorted. i've been told that the problem is my lack of a separate sound card. this computer has integrated audio and video.

i purchased an turtle beach sound card, installed it's drivers, installed the card and rebooted my machine. the sound is still coming through the integrated ports and NOT throught the sound card's ports. the card IS listed under "sound, video and game controllers" in "device manager".

searching the net for this problem, i repeated come across references to changing the bios for systems such as mine with integrated sound and video. however, none of these sites are very specific as to what to do. all they do is warn you about not being able to reboot after changing the bios incorrectly.

how do i acces the bios? once there, what do i change? how easy is it to screw up my system while doing this?

thanks in advance for any help.

The usual steps would be to: Keep hitting the Delete key at bootup to go into the BIOS setup menu. Go to Integrated Peripherals and set Onboard Sound to disabled, then when you boot to Windows check it is setup properly and resume experimenting.


Liam

To access Gateway's BIOS press F2, or F1. Most non branded computers use the Delete key, but branded computers such as Gateway, Dell, HP/Compaq use the F keys, or a combination of F keys and some other keys.

Found the Gateway key here:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/bios_manufacturer.htm

thanks. it is the f1 key that gets me into the bios. and it is under the "peripherals" section that integrated sound card can be disables.

so the card works ... but not as well as i expected.

the fruity loops files that i'm currently working with sound okay. but there are still some that are distorted.

i don't know anything about sound cards. this one was $30. there was a sound blaster for the same price. the next cards run about $70 - more than i really wanted to spend on a sound card.

what IS the difference between a $30 and a $70 card? sound blaster has "Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit' card at $30 and "Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value" at $70.

any suggestions?

i'd hate to return this one for a $70 card and find the same fl files are distorted.

thanks again.

The Audigy card will definitely give better quality than the Live! card, but the difference is really not all that great (I have the Live! on my older PC and the Audigy2 on my newer one, and most of the time I'm hard pressed to tell the difference).

I'm not familiar with Fruity Loops, but is it possible that some of those sounds are meant to be distorted?

second question first ... no, they're not meant to be distorted. when i export the files into mp3 or wav format, there is no distortion.

didn't see audigy at microcenter (where i bought the turtle beach card). i may stop in at best buy this afternoon (another computer retailer) and see what they have available.

thanks to sparks.

If your going to be doing any multi track sound on your computer it's a good idea to get a decent sound card. Sound blaster Audigy is a good choice for beginners. Sounds good, has low latency and can handle quite a few different sample rates. To me it sounds like you may have a sample rate issue. If the sounds that you have are being played in a defferent sample rate then what your project is setup to use or what your sound card can handle you will hear sample rate conversion distortion. This tends to happen in realtime playback. However when you export to a WAV or MP3 the sample rate is converted properly thus no crappy distortion.

Example:
You play a 48k sample rate sound on a 44.1K sample rate project the sound will be to fast becasue there is more samples per second on the 48k. If you play a 44.1K sound on a 48k project the sound will be in real time but sound distorted.

Better sound cards can compensate for this problem but it's still a good idea to check to make sure that everything is the same.

I use Nuendo for Audio Post Production and run into that issue very often. All my projects are 48k and all the sounds I get are 44.1 or sometimes lower.

If your really thinking about getting into multitrack recording or playback, Musicman makes some really good cards for just over $100.



HS

thanks hs.

i just got back from best buy. they only had the $30 and $70 sound blasters. the salesman said there was no difference - only that the $70 allows for more speaker output. i find that hard to believe for a $40 difference in price. it's possible they moved him from washing machines to computer hardware just last week. lol.

since i don't have any problems with what i'm doing now with the $30 turtle beach card, i'll just keep it.

turtle beach's site says it has "24 Bits at 48KHz". sound blaster live (the $30 model) seems to be the same. the sound blaster audigy 2 (the $70 model) seems to be at 192 kHz.

no reason to spend more money until i find out if i want continue with this composition thing.

thanks again, all.

done some research on "turtle beach" which turns out not the be the turtle beach i heard of years ago.

i found a review at http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=512

it begins by stating ...

"Back in the early days of PCI Audio there was a company that offered sound solutions marketed towards gamers and musicians. Turtle Beach was known for their sound cards, specifically the Montego line of cards."

this is why the name is familiar to me.

but turtle beach went bankrupt and through a number of acquisitions.

the review goes on to say ...

"But further reading shows that the Riviera can only output 24 bit/48KHz across the Optical SPDIF output."

.. which i am not using. this may explain the distortion still in some of the FL files.

and further ...

"After analysis of the Riviera drivers and manuals posted on the Turtle Beach FTP, the Riviera is nothing more than a PCI card based on the C-Media CMI8738 DSP, which is an old dated PCI sound controller that has been around for nearly 3 years."

and this review was dated from may fo 2004!

so ... i'm going to return in in exchange for the sound blaster live. should be no problem there.

again, thanks to all who responded.

You're Welcome, the Soundblaster Live! is an excellent card, it has served me well for a couple of years now, although i don't do anything mind boggling with it.:rolleyes::)


Liam

as an aside, i was planning on getting a video card for my machine, but will be putting off that until the end of the year. btw, "my machine" is a gateway 300se, celeron processor (i know - ugh), 1.2GH processor, 120GB + 160GB drives, 17" samsung lcd monitor. i have 3 open pci slots - though 1 is currently taken up with a USB2 card (used with my scanner & camera but far from critical).

since i won't be looking for a video card until later this year or early next year (i'm sure i'll post a thread for that), i'm wondering if i should exchange the turtle beach sound card for the sound blaster live ($30) or move up to the sound blaster audigy 2 value ($70).

any ideas or comments on these two cards?

hmmmm

i just bought and installed the sound blaster live card.

what a disappointment!

it's worse thant the turtle beach riviera i returned.

at least the turtle beach played most of the fruity loops files okay - only 2 were distorted. none of the files play un-distorted with the sound blaster live.

the card came with "device control" software. with it i can change the sampling rate (either 48 or 96 kHz) and the bit depth (16 or 24 bits). no change in these settings makes any difference.

i don't suppose the sound blaster audigy 2 would be any better, does anyone think?

my processor runs at 1.2 GHz. could THAT be a problem too?

It's possible that the slow CPU could be the cause of the problem. As I said above the Audigy2 is a bit better than the Live!, but there's not that much in it. Music is outstanding on both my PC's, one with Live and one with Audigy2, as are DVD's. But my slowest PC is a 2.4GHz.

What do audio CD's sound like?

my processor runs at 1.2 GHz. could THAT be a problem too?

Probably not. However, if you have too many applications running, it could slow down your sound.

Try this: Disable everything on your taskbar. Including your antivirus. MAKE SURE YOU'RE NOT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET!!!!

Open & play your fruity loops and see if your sound is better. If it is, you need to download your tunes to your computer, then play from there-after disabling all your apps.

Hope this helps

disabled everything i could. no change.

btw, i went to sound blaster site and looked at the forum posts there. per a suggestion there, i slowed down my video hardware accelerator. no change there either.

audio cds play fine. mp3 and wav files on the pc play fine also. just these fruity loop files.

i thought it would be easy to us fl to compose music ... but it's annoying to have to export the fl files to mp3 or wav to really hear what i'm composing.

too bad. it looked like it would be fun. *sigh*

from another forum (fruity loops, to be exact), i received the advice:

Quote:

---

press F10 and go to the audio tab, slide your buffer up until the file plays smoothly.

---

works fine.

now, of course, i wonder if i even NEED a separate audio card. oh, well.

later yesterday a friend sent me another file. fl started to distort at bar 33. i moved the buffer up all the way to 16384 (371ms) but that changed nothing. still very distorted.

i brought the fl file to work, installed FL and tried it there. that machine has pentium 4 cpu at 3.0 Ghz with integrated audio/video. it works fine there even though the fl buffer is only set to 2048 (46ms).

so, after all this, the problem seems to be my pc's slow processor :(

i have approximately the same computer hardware as the original poster. i'm also having integrated sound issues. it distorts the mid-heavy guitar tones on mp3's. i havent had problems with games or movies. i've also tried using headphones instead of my speakers, which produced the same distortion. i'm just wondering if a new sound card would fix the problem. also, as a note to the original poster about updating his video card. i recently did that and bought a sapphire radeon 9250 card from newegg.com so you might want to try there.