I've had issues with Creative on XP too but nowhere near as bad as this. Occasionally everything would sound muffled or one of the line-ins would only make loud noise. Switching modes always fixed it.

Guessing from the lack of replies I must be the only one experiencing these issues. Think I'll have to check on XP x64 to make sure it's not some chipset incompatibility with this sound card.

Here's a quick test, playing a 440Hz tone on the right channel in Cool Edit:

As you can see the same tone appears on the left channel -30dB. The phase plot above should be perfectly flat (but slightly skewed since there's this crosstalk)... It's oval, suggesting a phase delay between the left and right channels.

I don't get the crosstalk when testing left/right channels in the creative speaker console, so I'm thinking it must be a software problem.

I've experienced the phenomenon you're describing, but it never bothered me enough to follow it up.

Creative's drivers ever since Vista came out have been crap shack, even after they "fixed" them in response to the Daniel K driver fiasco. So I'd not be surprised at all if it were their fault.

jwt27 wrote:

It's certainly not perfect XD As I said, Creative CMSS-3D for example seems pretty messed up on Windows 7. Even the helicopter t […]
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cdoublejj wrote:

7 has a lot more than dx10 and 11 as far as the original post is cornered. it can also make better use of the latest hardware than older OSes can. it also does OKAY with retro gaming as far as 32 bit is cornered but, it's not perfect.

It's certainly not perfect 🤣
As I said, Creative CMSS-3D for example seems pretty messed up on Windows 7. Even the helicopter test in the control panel sounds wrong.
Have yet to try any 256-colour games, but from what I've seen on friend's PCs I expect them to be broken too.

cdoublejj wrote:

are theses blue screens you are reporting on the new system in the original posts? windows 7 or windows 8?

Yes, I get these on my new system, both in XP x64 and 7 x64. Most seem to point to the Intel AHCI drivers. Haven't seen any with the Creative drivers so far 😀

cdoublejj wrote:

EDIT: oh yeah there is setup feature in windows 7 that sets up how you like your fonts and screen settings by answering some questions. (like the eye doctor)

I assume you mean the cleartype tuner. I ran that, but my settings on questions 3 and 4 don't seem to be saved correctly. With question 3 you can supposedly switch between subpixel rendering and greyscale antialiasing. But it looks like that only works in WPF applications like Visual Studio. I disabled Cleartype entirely now, and now most fonts look like they did on XP (not that that was any good, but at least it's better than subpixel rendering).

for all sound cards?

Sounds like a faulty hardware, it's new right? why not rma it?

well i guess you sort of solved the problem.

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as to the whole windows 8 thing it very well may have better fonts, i can't really remember it but, i remember tek syndicate (youtube channel) covering the font setup on 8 but, i remember little.

crt vs LCD... well some one on here posted some pictures of the pixels on a CRT and an LCD it really explained some things for me. fonts may look better on CRT... i'm not entirely sure or rather i'm too lazy to make this post long and talk about this stuff, would probably be easier to say in words.

Looks like I fixed the phase/crosstalk issue. don't ask how but it's gone now 🤣

Now let's hope it stays that way...