Good afternoon!
I recently sought out and bought an older model of SoundBlaster card.
I'm interested in playing Halo: Combat Evolved on PC, and since it uses EAX processing and hardware acceleration I ended up getting a card from the same era, specifically the Soundblaster Audigy EAX Advanced HD (SB0090).
Now that I've installed the card into my computer, I'm having a hell of a time getting it to play any sound at all in Windows 10.
While there doesn't appear to be an official Windows 10 driver for this card, I was able to get Windows to recognize it by extracting the latest driver version from Creative and scanning its folder for the files.
My jury-rigged solution obviously failed, as while the device appears to be active in Windows 10 (and the Volume Mixer even shows the green bar indicating audio should be playing), no sound comes out of the speakers.
Google searches led me to an unofficial driver pack which ostensibly supports Windows 10 --
this one.
This installed fine, but there was still no sound output from the card, and for now I have gone back to the official Creative driver. I haven't tested the other ports on the card (Line-out, microphone, etc) but they do also appear in the Sound settings.
I am most likely going to throw together an XP machine to put it in if it just isn't compatible, but I'm holding out hope that there's some sort of magic spell that will conjure sound out of this thing on Windows 10. While I'm reading in places that it had issues with 64-bit addressing, the latest driver version does seem indicate 64-bit compatibility, but there might also be something inherent to Windows 10 (or a newer version) that is getting in the way.
If it helps, I am running Windows 10 version 1909
Thank you for taking the time to read! I appreciate your help :)
I found these working cards in a few discarded desktops and was wondering which of them is better quality for surround sound and HD music playback.
- CMI8738/C3DX
- Sound Blaster CT4780 SBLive! Value
- Sound Blaster SB0090 Audigy PlayeOEM
- Sound Blaster SB0400 Audigy2 Value
- Sound Blaster SBLive! 5.1 eMicro 28028.
From the description Linux mint gives for the cards, the SB0400 Audigy2 Value is 7.1 capable with the rest being only 5.1. I assume the SB0400 Audigy2 Value is the best but the SB0090 Audigy PlayeOEM has more interior ports/inputs and looks to have more features. Online manuals for the cards were confusing and have not been very helpful. If someone could explain the differences between the cards and list them from greatest to least it would help me a lot.
I know these are very old cards and don't work in newer windows without third party drivers, but they are better than anything else I own since my computer does not have analogue surround sound outputs. I have been using them in Linux Mint Mate 17.2 for a while but if I can find the correct drivers for the cards and get them to work, I would love to be able to use them in Windows 7 and 8.1. for specific programs.
Also, if anyone could advise me on how to get the most out of the cards, by using the internal inputs or pins on the cards or possibly using more than one at a time, it would be great! I hope this wasn't asking to much.