Friday, October 13, 2006

On-board audio - does it ever work?

I am more and more regretting my purchase of the M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard (over the Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5). Since I have started to use the on-board ADI1988b audio (after having to pull my Audigy out of the computer) I have noticed a slight intermittent problem: no sound. Yes, randomly (after boot-up) the rear line-out is not outputting any sound (although turning up my speakers to full volume yields some faint resemblance of what I should be hearing). However, plugging my speaker cable into the headphone socket on the front of my tower gets me sound again. Then plugging it back into the rear of my tower, and restarting the computer would also get me my sound back - as well as a "New audio device connected message" straight after boot-up from the AudioESP feature. Great...

So, judging by the message, I thought (naturally) that it was AudioESP at fault for this. I disabled it, but alas the problem has continued since. So for now I am stuck with plugging my speakers into the headphone socket, until I find a solution.

Also quite funny is how they include a file in the sound driver with the following line repeated again and again: "This is a "dummy" CAT file to take up space and pretend it is not useless". Hmmm... inspires confidence, doesn't it? ;)

Update: Seems to be a bug the the 4560 version of the driver. Reverting to 4530 fixed it.

No comments: