Creative have a list on what cards have Win11 support.
https://support.creative.com/kb/ShowArticle.aspx?sid=200667

The only other company I know that are in the sound card business is the Asus Xonar range which I'm not familiar with but the current gen cards all have Win11 drivers.
https://www.asus.com/au/motherboards-componen … rds/all-series/

The Xonar DX cards are really good and only need a 1x PCIe slot, the Xonar DX 7.1 is a high quality card high grade components on it, but if all OP needs is a good but cheap card then the DGX/DS is the way to go.

Thanks guys, this is where my problems start. ASUS has terrible driver support and most of their budget offerings are old and about to be EOLd.

The Xonar DX is also EOLd already so ASUS is out of the picture.
That basically leaves Creative.
The Audigy FX has a Realtek chip and isn't any better than my onboard audio.
The Audigy RX is an ancient design with new drivers and an inflated price tag.
The SB Z SE looks good but pricey.

That leaves external sound cards and most of those are crappy Chinese/Taiwanese products while good brands are well above $100.

I'll just stick with the good old 7 and save for a new rig when no browser supports this anymore. Ironic, because I can easily upgrade it to 11 and it runs fine but without driver support it's useless. I can't live without bass!

Thanks for the suggestions though.

Vipachei wrote on 2024-03-07, 08:05:

Thanks guys, this is where my problems start. ASUS has terrible driver support and most of their budget offerings are old and ab […]
Show full quote

Thanks guys, this is where my problems start. ASUS has terrible driver support and most of their budget offerings are old and about to be EOLd.
92928.jpg
The Xonar DX is also EOLd already so ASUS is out of the picture.
That basically leaves Creative.
The Audigy FX has a Realtek chip and isn't any better than my onboard audio.
The Audigy RX is an ancient design with new drivers and an inflated price tag.
The SB Z SE looks good but pricey.

That leaves external sound cards and most of those are crappy Chinese/Taiwanese products while good brands are well above $100.

I'll just stick with the good old 7 and save for a new rig when no browser supports this anymore. Ironic, because I can easily upgrade it to 11 and it runs fine but without driver support it's useless. I can't live without bass!

Thanks for the suggestions though.

ASUS Xonar AE 7.1 supports win 11 and is about 85 AUD which should be even cheaper for US buyers.

The AE has some high end Audio components so itll be a huge upgrade over on board sound and miles better than any trash Creative currently make.

On my machine I just picked up an external DAC with Mixer and AMP, it runs off SPDIF and cost me about 150 AUD to put together, hands down the best thing I ever did as the sound it produces will happily beat any internal soundcard you can buy.

I'm running an X-Fi Titanium with Daniel K drivers in my W11 rig.

I started fiddling with Windows 11 again to get it to play nice somehow and succeeded. I checked the exact driver version that worked under 7 (v6.0.1.6662 (2.70)) and installed it under 11. I didn't expect a 12 year old driver to work but it did. I also had to set the Realtek manager to select Sub/center as the output instead of the Line-in that was set as default. It didn't work with the new Realtek driver but it did with the old one.
I appreciate the suggestions though and I'm glad I don't have to spend money to finally use Windows 11.

Don't forget to prevent Windows from automatically updating your drivers (if that's even still an option in 11). I've had problems with Windows Update replacing drivers with broken ones (even downgrading my graphics driver).

lti wrote on 2024-03-08, 04:19:

Don't forget to prevent Windows from automatically updating your drivers (if that's even still an option in 11). I've had problems with Windows Update replacing drivers with broken ones (even downgrading my graphics driver).

It is an option, and I know this because it took me a week to figure out why a BlueTooth adapter kept 'breaking' on reboot and it was swapping the driver on each reboot. 😒 Solvable tho.

lti wrote on 2024-03-08, 04:19:

Don't forget to prevent Windows from automatically updating your drivers (if that's even still an option in 11). I've had problems with Windows Update replacing drivers with broken ones (even downgrading my graphics driver).

Older versions than 11, update has broken sound drivers twice on me, and they had a big uproar the first time because it was quite widespread, they don't learn.

Recent developments in sidechannel attacks might have them more fussy about sound drivers though, there are insertion attacks by remotely stimulating microphones, data exfiltration attacks by getting them to chirp out sensitive data at high frequencies, password slurping attacks where AIs trained on the noise of keyboards can read your password from the typing noises... so yeah, they might be a bit picky about qualifying sound drivers these days.

Thanks, I see that the new Realtek driver is available in the optional updates menu, waiting patiently to ruin my day.
I had to install gpedit.msc because it's a Windows 11 Home edition and enabled the Do not include drivers with Windows Update policy. It should be good now.

Have you considered of having an USB based sound adapter?

I'm still happy with my Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit External
https://support.creative.com/Products/Product … l&CatName=Sound

I use analogue 5.1 with this setup.

There was once a way to prevent updates for one specific device, even in home editions. That's what I did in Windows 10 Home to prevent it from installing a four-year-old graphics driver with known bugs affecting video playback.

USB audio devices were mentioned earlier, but anything that's an upgrade over modern onboard audio (or even equivalent in features - Vipachei has an unusual setup with analog 5.1 audio) gets expensive. The cheap ($30) 5.1/7.1 boxes are known to be noisy and poorly made (some of them have been coming from the factory for years with every electrolytic cap installed backwards, and that error survived a revision to switch to a fully surface mount PCB).