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05/27/2003: "Sound Card Angst"

When your Sound Blaster sound card simply ceases to make sound, and it happens (see more.. below), just replace it with an Hercules Game Theater XP 6.1 or 7.1 soundcard and you'll be far and away better off. The Game Theater comes with an external rack (like SB Audigy 2 EX for less than half the price) giving easy access to the audio connectors, game port and 4 high speed USB ports. Killer!

One morning, for no apparent reason, my sound card ceased to make sound. It was a Sound Blaster Live, no more than six months old, installed in a desktop computer of the same age. I had never broken a sound card before so it took me a while to admit that I really had a problem. First I rebooted from Windows 2000 into Windows 98, where I had been playing a flight simulation the night before, and I still had no sound, then while in Windows 98 I did the uninstall and reinstall drivers dance. No help. Then I open the case and moved the sound card to a different PCI slot. I repeated the driver dance while periodically checking both Windows 98 and Windows 2000 for signs of success. All of this flailing achieved nothing.

I searched the Internet, called a few friends, and sent a few e-mails. The best anyone else could come up with was some kind of mystical connection to my running a double boot. That's possible, but I've been doing it for years and nowadays I no longer double install applications into the same directory as I did with NT 4.0 and Windows 95, not with 40 Gig hard drives, besides the moose applications like Microsoft Office won't work anymore with a double install into the same directory. Oh well, I went out and bought a new SoundBlaster Live and installed it. Not a peep. I moved the card to a different PCI slot. Still nothing. I began, I think irrationally, to twitch again about the double boot. I had a copy of Windows XP Pro, so I installed it in a new NTFS partition and was able to scratch multiboot problems, finally, off the list because the sound card still didn't work.

I returned the new SoundBlaster Live and tried an SB AWE 32 ISA card from the old stuff box and when that failed I began to think that my motherboard had gone south, but everything else works. If, I reasoned, the SoundBlaster PCI card and the SoundBlaster ISA card, manufactured some seven years earlier, aren't different enough to 'work around' this unknown problem (I was pretty strung out by this time) maybe I need old new chip set. I went shopping for a Turtle Beach sound card. That's when I found the Hercules. It worked.

Not only did the Hercules work but it worked better. Games, simulations, and music all sounded better. On Windows 2000 my sound editing software and Dragon dictation software both required tweaking to the configuration but performance improved dramatically and I have the desktop rack.

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Replies: 2 Comments

Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster compatible are phrases that cut a lot of ice and are some of the most venerable of multimedia and gaming standards however, the sounds of silence, for whatever reason, can lead you to some very happy discoveries.

Cliff said @ 06/02/2003 02:12 PM CST

Your Mama!

Not Just Compatible said @ 05/30/2003 02:55 PM CST