Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Music no sound at boot.

[Br1t1shB33f]

Hi all, i have this strange issue with my sound card that many hours trauling googles have failed to fix and was hoping u guys could help.

This is a Picture of the card in question. (best i could find in the time)

First of all i'll tell you about my card. Its an OEM revision 1 Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Music that i bough off ebay back in 2006/7. It was 1 for 20 taken from broken down pc's that hadent sold or were faulty from the original seller so lets just say it was a bargin at £26.

Secondly its worked perfectly bar a few standard software issues or reinstalls.

Now comes the crunch. After i have had windows 7 this card has been giving me all kinds of jip. but iv got the sound working fine. the issue is it never works on boot. i get sound to log in on the windows screen i hear the sound letting me know if correctly added the passoword. But the software auto mutes my card and applys the "Automaticlly enable headphone settings" and "Automatically mute speakers."

This never used to happen. I have tried to untick and close the program but it never saves the settings.

Also its disables the X-Fi Crystalliser and i have to manually enable it every boot. iv tryed downloading and using the latest and inbetween versions of the software for the card but to no avail. Also it sets my system volume to 67% even though i have this switched off in windows.

So here in clear terms are my issues.

1. Software doesnt save settings regardless of version.

2. On booting windows the Headphone detection settings are always on.

3. X-Fi Crystalliser is always off till i set it.

4. System Volume set to 67% every boot.

5. Reinstalling the card doent help.

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[alienware]

I had the same card. The reason they are hard to ID is because they are Dell/Alienware OEM. I sold mine in the end because every time I used it in Vista or 7 it would let out a loud shriek (sounded like scraping glass) and dissapear from the system. Only a reinstall would fix it.

In the end I found out that the issue is the card. When used with XP it allows for hardware sound acceleration. In Vista and 7 that was binned for software only acceleration. Basically it was supposed to slipsteam into Direct X better. And for the most part it does. Sadly Creative just couldn't get used to it and put out loads of bummy cards that did not function properly in Vista or 7.

I know this only too well because two friends of mine are incredibly talented coders and both coded emulators. These emulators run old fruit machines. However, with certain techs these machines used Synth sound. It's very old technology used in the 80s. Basically what would happen was the emulator would call to the sound card's wavetable and get it to produce a beep or tone. It's very similar to the old beep command in Sinclair Basic. At that point the sound card would answer back with the correct beep tone or blip, all generated from synth. No wavs, no sound files, nothing.

However when Vista and 7 released it soon became clear that the sound was no longer addressed in that manner. When called to the sound card would just make horrid sounds that were garbled.. Kinda sounded like the speech on the Sega Megadrive (like it had a mouth full of cornflakes).

So messed up was it that neither coder could find a way to sort it out, as for nigh on twenty years sound cards had always been addressed by the hardware acceleration (remember you used to have a slider for it incase of problems?).

That's why Creative are no longer the force they used to be. Infact, I would even go as far to say that unless you want extremely high bitrate playback for movies or music (sound studio and so on) that onboard works equally as well.