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Sound much too quiet with Sound Blaster Live 4620

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First post, by Bubu2000

Posted on 
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Hello friends

I have a problem with my new Sound Blaster Live 4620 sound card. I have pretty decent active stereo speakers connected and the Direct Sound audio in games is really quiet and sounds very thin like a cheap laptop speaker. If I turn up the bass slider in the mixer, the sound stays very quiet but just starts crackling.

If I use the Creative EAX driver instead of Direct Sound in the game, the volume behaves completely normal and I have a nice rich sound.

I have reinstalled Windows 98 several times and tried all available drivers without success. The same speakers sound really good on my onboard sound card. On the SBLive I have to turn up my speakers almost twice as loud to get the same volume as from the onboard card. And still it sounds much worse, completely without bass.

Specs:
Asus A7V600-X
Athlon XP 1600+
512 MB DDR RAM
80 GB HDD
GeForce FX 5500
SB Live 4620
Clean freshly installed Win 98 SE

Reply 1 of 1, by Bubu2000

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I had a really big testing marathon yesterday, to maybe find a solution.

I tried all 6 of my PCI slots, nothing changed.

I tried it on win95/98/98SE/ME, nothing changed.

I tried different DirectX versions from DX6 to DX9, nothing changed.

I tried 2 different driver CDs and the newer Audigy drivers, nothing changed.

Edit: I tried it in another Win98 PC, nothing changed.

It sounds like the output signal is not amplified at all, everything is very quiet and overdrives even at low volumes. Everything with bass is filtered out, I can't hear the explosions in Forsaken for example.

The strange thing is, everything in Windows and all of my games are really really quiet and without bass , with one exception.

The racing game Motorhead has completely normal volume and deep bass, no matter if I choose DirectSound, DirectSound3D or Creative EAX output.

Can somebody please help me? Any ideas what I could try next? Why is my soundblaster only one third as loud as my crappy onboard sound?

EDIT

I recapped the card with not so cheap Nichicon audio caps and it still sounds like crap.

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