I'm having problems with Sound Blaster Live.
My Specs:
MB: Abit KT7-133 Raid
Mem: 256K
OS: Win Me
Vid: All-In-Wonder Radeon
HD: 2 X 20Gig IBM Deskstar

My problem is when I listen to MP3 or wave files as well as play DVD the SB Live sounds like the the Reverb and the Chorus is on full blast making it so distorted that it really bad!

I've updated the All-in-wonder, sound blaster live, and directX drivers as well as removed the 16bit emulation in the computers property. I've also moved the card to the 5th pci slot.

What else should I do?

Help!!!!
SBLive sounds like garbage!

Installing the APS driver solved all the crackling on playback files. But I cant get my joystick port to work properly. I'm still trying will post back if I learn anything.

Sys Config:
300w PS (ATX)
Iwill Xa100Plus
AMD K62 500 3Dnow
196 mb PC100
ATI All In Wonder128 16mb PCI
SB Live (X-Game)
Cambride FPS2000 (digital)
Texas Inst. 56k Data Fax Voice
3comm 10/100 NIC
WD 27.3g 5400 8.3 HDD
ZIP 100 Internal IDE
Phillips DVD/CD-Rom
HP 7200i CD-RW
Intel USB Netcam
HP Deskjet 895Cse (USB)
AGFA Snapscan 1236u (USB)
AGFA CL30 (USB)
Sandisk Imagemate CF (USB)
CD-Blazer External MultiDrive (parrell)

I placed this hardware list in case someone knows of problems with any of it and the LIVE card.

Hi, I dunno what my problem is, but when I start Windows Me or Windows XP (Beta), With Creative Drivers in XP, there is a very horrible static sound before the startup sound, and for Windows Me is the same issue, ¿What Should I do?, My system is: Intel Motherboard Model D815EPEA2, Intel Pentium III Processor 800 EB, 2 128mb Kingston Value Ram Modules (CL 3), Asus V6800 Video Card Deluxe, Hollywood Plus MPEG-2 Decoder, 3com Windmodem, and a Realtek Network Controller (forgot the model), Quantum Fireball lct20 Harddrive (40 gb), Pioneer a04s DVD-ROM drive (connected thru Analog Cd in to sblive), and Hewlett Packard 8100 Cd-writer plus, mine Sblive is an OEM with digital Out, the other problem is that I have to put almost at full volume the card to hear sound at an acceptable volume (I use Cambridge 4 point surround), I would aprrecitate getting Help, thanks!

I have a temporary fix for crackling audio problems that are arise when environmental reverb is on. I use Cakewalk and do a lot of music writing and can't have even a hint of crackling since I record music and use reverb a lot. Through trial and error I have found this combination to be completely successful. (Other solutions or combinations of settings still leave small cracklings from time to time).

Motherboard: Abit KT7-RAID
BIOS: latest BIOS

1. Change decode strength --> normal
2. DRAM 4k page mode --> disable
3. 4-way interleve --> disable
4. Pipeline Req. --> disable
5. Enhanced chipset --> disable

You MUST do all these settings. The rest of the settings under BIOS I have all maxed out. This solves my crackling audio, though it possibly slows the computer a bit. When I'm in a gaming mood, I just reboot and change BIOS settings back to normal.

Please let me know if this works for anyone else besides me!

And check out my music at http://www.mp3.com/beyondmusic
(Sb-live! used for a lot of instruments and reverb, proof that it works!)

i´ll try to explain a GENERAL SOLUTION:
i´ve experienced (nice :-) the crackling problems and also the data corruption bug on my chaintech aia0-d10ac (kt133/ata66). i guess for both problems the source was the
686b.

try the following:
a) get the newest bios update (this should solve the data corruption bug but not the crackling problems !!) because via is working together with most mainboard manufacturers to solve it
b)use VIA 4in1 4.29a (not 4in1 3.31 or higher!!) because the patch included in 4in1 is solving the data corruption bug but the crackling problems are getting worse !!! (http://www.au-ja.de/review-kt133a-1.html)
c)to correct the crackling problems use the pci latency patch which changes different (for the use with the live better) bios addresses

after doing this your system should work very well
greets
pacman

I connected a sound blaster live! in a motherboard intel that supports pentium 4 cpu and I heard a crackling sound or static and noise from my speakers, I thought that the card was damaged, and I decided to change the power supply that is tested and comply with FCC standards: RU, CE, SA, FC and I was happy for the results. Now I dont hear no static at all. my sound blaster works 100% very good. I think some power supplies dont work properly. try it power supply APOLLO model NO:VT-300 BA-T ATX 300W switching power supply.

Problems with crackling started (paradoxically)when I installed service pack 2 for Windows 2000. However, problems disappeared when installing the Via 4.32 beta driver (I have an Abit KT-133A motherboard with AMD 1.2 GHz)

I'm running SB Live Value on an Abit VP-6 and a MSI 694D and have no problems whatsoever (NOW) with the 3107 modified or the 3209 drivers. Both systems are dual P3-1gHz running at 1.203 gHz with PC150 SDRAM at Cl2. One system uses a gForce2 MX DH and the other a 3dLabs GVX210

Here's what I did for Via eqpt MBs and Win2K Sp2:
1. Install the Via 4.31 drivers with the latency etc fixes.
2. Download from liveservice.com.ar and install the files necessary to make devldr32.exe run as a SERVICE.
3. LEAVE EVERYTHING ELSE ALONE!!

Now be sure to install Sp2. If you use the 3107 drivers and want to have the equalizer enabled in EAX you should DL the eq patch from 3dsoundsurge.com and apply it to the 3209 version of emu10k1f.sys. Then use the prg inuse.exe from the Resource Kit to replace the old version of emu10k1f.sys

You can have the EAX equalizer in the 3107 set by simply using the patched 3209 file..You don't have to change everything.

By using the liveserviec.com fix to run devldr32.exe as a service you get rid of the annoying high volume at startup!! It also makes the snap, crackle and pop left after the Via fix go away. In my systems all of the EAX stuff works just fine and I have zero snap, crackle and pop...

Good luck to all.

I have MVP3 motherboard with AMD K6-2 450 MHz. Soundblaster SBLive Value. Using Win9x no problems with Creative LiveWare 3. The only bug (also in Win2k more offen) I noticed in Unreal Tournament: from time to time game doesn't respond and my hard drive start to work hard when using EAX. Without EAX no problems at all. So I think you can live with SB Live. But the problem is I start to use Win2k one and half year ago. Under this OS (it doesn't matter what kind of Creative drivers I use) from time to time I noticed some skips when using Winamp (any version) with Direct Sound plug-in. With Wave Out no problem. Also with the default Win2k drivers for SB Live no problems with Winamp. With games the same story. With Creative drivers under Unreal Tournament using EAX the same sproblem like in Win9x. With Star Trek Armada a lot of crackling (I can't switch off the EAX in this game). Using Win2k drivers again no problems (I noticed the default driver doesn't have support for EAX). So you pay for some extra futures (like EAX) but you can't use it. I saw Win2k beeing a better OS for games with new drivers from NVidia. The question is: why Creative does nothing to change this think (it's obvious is not Microsoft or Via fault due your reports on different systems). How I solved the problem? I'm using Win2k drivers with no EAX.

Re: Somebody talk about power supply. Let's take a closer look. SB Live (doesn't matter what version) has digital circuits and only a few Digital - Analog Converters (DAC) for output and input (ADC). So the part that is responsible for processing doesn't have any business with noise (there is digital signal). The converters can't introduce this crackling problems.

At my computer (Asus P2B) the SoundBlaster uses the same IRQ as the Serial bus controller.

With Windows 98 that wasn’t any problem. But with Windows 2000 I get clicks at a random time. I have changed the SoundBlaster to another slot and the Clicks are gone :-).

Hello all. My name is Gustavo Delgado from Argentina.

1) I have installed the PCI latency patch created by "George E. Breese" and my playback cracks and clics were out in my Sound Blaster Live 5.1.

2) Now I can make copy, move, and work with my hard disk and simultaneously playing a MP3 audio file. (before imposible) without drop clics.

Mother Soyo 5EH5 v.1.3 VP3 VT82C596 (66 Mhz)
Pentium 233 MMX
Dimm 32 MB ram (66 Mhz)
Dimm 128 MB ram (133 Mhz)
Windows 98 SE.

** I'm using that patch with all the Soyo CD drivers also installed. But I disabled the UDMA option in the ETEQDMATOOL software and BIOS SETUP for all of my drives.
** Properties of system file
Net server
reading optimization: NONE
** Problems Solution.
Disable write cache....
** Graphics
Graphics acceleration: One step to the left postion.

PROBLEMS: ¿?

You may download the VIA patch at www.viahardware.com

The KT7A Motherboard has been the major problem, and users has experienced problems with distortion, crackling and sound fonts going wrong.

Abit have just released a new BIOS update for the KT7 Series, and the problems have been sorted. I have experienced none of the problems after the update, and everything is working as it should.

I strongly advise anyone with a KT7 board to download the new bios :)

New BETA Via 4-in-1 drivers out that are claiming to fix the problem with data corruption when using two hard drives and an SBLive!

After upgrading my motherboard to a Jetway 663asPro I could no longer use soundfonts as they made attrocious noises, especially at the top end of the keyboard, reverb effects also made it worse. I loaded WPCREDIT and set register 52 so that bit 7 ( STPGNT ) is 0. Soundfonts now play perfectly.

First off, if you don't already know, this crackling/poping problem is not limited to VIA chipsets, it happens on Intel chipsets too! I have tried my Soundblaster Live! Platinum (Model: CT4760) on a ASUSTeK K7V VIA KX-133 motherboard, a Intel DBG815EP i815EP motherboard and a ASUSTeK CUSL2-C Intel i815EP motherboard and I got the crackling/poping sound problem with all of them. I also have 4 reports of people getting this problem with their CUSL2/CUSL2-C motherboards and 9 reports of people getting this with other Intel chipset motherboards. The rest get crackling/poping with VIA chipsets. Out of the 50 people who have this problem, 4 people were able to fix it by switching their power supplies. Here's why:

Cheap, no-name power supplies tend to produce a lot of electrical "white noise". The noise is caused by poor engineering. It is produced when electrical circuits and transformers switch power leads on and off to the motherboard and other peripherals. This switching produces this "pop" and "click" sounds. The Soundblaster Live! series PCB are very sensitive to this kind of electrical "noise". It picks it up and amplifies it to your speakers/headphones. High quality power supplies cut down on this electrical noise -drastically- by using higher quality components and better engineering.

This could explain why some people get the crackling/poping sounds and others don't. You might want to recommend it to some people or try it yourself if your getting this problem. If your looking for a high quality power supply, buy one from either Enermax or PC Power and Cooling because from what I've seen and heard, they manufacturer the most stable/reliable quality power supplies. I have personally not tried this solution myself because I'm saving up for one. Please let me know if this works for you or others.

I fought my little private war with statics since I upgraded by mobo and CPU.

I have Abit BX-133 board with P3 500, oldest SB Live Value version possible running in slot 1 (IRQ 10, not shared) and Win98SE. What is important i have IBM 7200rpm 45GB ATA-100 drive (which is important). I am musician and i use Cakewalk software for making music. With folks all over the world I was able to reprododuce this problem. But yesterday, after reading your articles something gave me a hint! Since I installed 4 different systems from the scratch (Win98,98SE,WinME,Win2k) and problem still occured i went to BIOS and found PCI Clock Latency setting to be set by default to 8. I switched it to 31 and problem's gone! I also tried different PCI slots before. Nothing helped. Only setting PCI latency to higher value! I was close to buying different card, but now I am happy! Statics occured from time to time but were most noticable during HDD operations (copying, recording to disk). As I said few folks all over the world were able to reproduce the problem. But now the problem is gone! Sorry for being chaotic, but I am happy. I fought with it since January. Tried different BX-133 mobos, even different SB Live's ( borrowed Live with digi minijack output, same statics occured). So now I am convinced it's problem with SB Live design. But it's now solved!. So slow down your PCI latency everybody! It can work!

For those of you with a sound Blaster Live! that don't have a Via motherboard, you can possibly get rid of the crackling sound when using EAX/deep reverb by lowering the clock rate of your mouse -I had mine set to both 100hz and 200hz using Logitech's 9.0 mouseware drivers, set it back to 80hz and no problems, also I had overclocked my bus to 150hz in my BIOS. I set it back to 100hz and no clickling whatsoever.

If you have a Via motherboard, go to their website and get the "4 in 1" download, that has fixedit for that motherboard, but, it disables DMA which makes your entire system run like dog squeeze. It's more of an undesireable workaround than a fix. You can use the updated drivers and get crappy system performance, get a new motherboard that is not a Via brand, or possibly try using Windows 2000. A new motherboard costs about as much as Windows 2000, so see if you can "borrow" a copy of Windows 2000 before buying it.

It makes sense why Windows 2000 and my Live! card worked fine on my overclocked system and Windows 98 did not -Windows 2000 manages memory and system resources a whole lot better. Just using Windows 98 for the past week since giving up on Windows 2000, I can see a huge difference in system performance.

I was doing allot of research on tweaking my computer witch generally consist of the following components the SB Live! value card+ latest drivers, FIC VA 503+ witch uses the Apollo chipset and a Diamond viper V770 ultra TNT2 based 3D Accelerator and I just so happened to stumble into the cure for the cracking popping distorted sound that the card has a tendency of making witch nobody seems to be able to get rid of.

I have even heard stories of people going to the outrageous extreme of disabling DMA to stop the problem at the cost of some serious system performance. well anyway I think I have found a cure for some of you. I too had the same problem when running Electronic Art's need for speed 5 Porsche unleashed and I believe that it was my video drivers from Diamond who were the culprit. after I switched to the Nevida drivers. the pops went away. some drivers do work better than others I recommend the earlier ones IM using the Detonator 3.53 they work grate but I hear the Detonator 2.17 pull off much higher frame rates. however I am not sure if the pops will come back :-) with the 2.17's.

also if you are using a Via MVP3 chipset you should install the Via PCI IRQ Routing MINIPORT Driver v1.3A, aside from being the best performing version of the driver I too installed this as well, so it could have been one or the other that did the trick.

Crackling resolved by moving the SbLive from PCI slot 3 to slot 1. Also get noise when there is mouse movement across a window or when dragging a window --- this was happening with the basic Windows 2000 drivers as well. Cause is the CD Audio. Mute the Cd Audio and no more noise. Other than that I had no install problem and no system problems with the new drivers.

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The Sound Blaster Live! has 4 separate S/PDIF digital outputs, with each of them carrying stereo (left & right)!

These outputs are available on a I/O card with the Digital DIN output.

The latest SBLive! 5.1 series uses 3 of these outputs to carry 6 channels of information.