Sound Popping and Crackling w/ Vista

[crunchtime]

Hi

Anyone else expierience sound popping and crackling when playing the demo?

I have a Creative Audigy 2ZS Card and as many know, they have had problems with vista and their drivers.

The game runs great, but without proper sound, whats the point!

Anyone experiencing the same issues?

I heard that this is because of Vista.

I tried turning of EAX/Reverb and get the same issues.

[Freddo]

I have a Creative Audigy 2ZS Card and as many know, they have had problems with vista and their drivers.
Aye, indeed. I suspect it's the Creative drivers that is the bad guy behind this. They always had bad drivers, even back in the DOS days, so having bad drivers for Vista is no surprise.

[dandragonrage]

Try these things (in order):
1) Make sure you have latest motherboard/chipset and audio drivers. Not just audio drivers.
2) Flash your motherboard BIOS to the latest.
3) Go into your BIOS and see if there's an option to increase your PCI latency. If you try this and it does not help, then go set it back to what it originally was.

[KamikaZe]

Many people reported this problem in the beginning with vista and bioshock wasn't even out back then. Perhaps it more noticable in bioshock but it might as well be a more global problem for you. If anything try to update everything you can

[dandragonrage]

Oh, duh, I forgot to mention to make sure Vista itself is up to date. Lump that in with #1.

[Grav]

Not just happening with creative sound cards -->

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5150

I have already tried changing bios settings, different drivers, different settings and everything is updated.

[Mon Ami]

Yea I got Vista and a X-Fi gamer card, however the sound works perfect for me. At first it did NOT, but that was because EAX was on. I simply turned it off, restarted the demo, and wala it worked perfectly. Not only that, but unlike every other game to date, I was able to set the speaker config I have (5.1) in the games settings (right above EAX and Reverb) and actually got true 5.1 surround sound which pleased me quite a lot because since vista is incompatible with the old sound processing cards no games (old or new) until this one had surround sound, at best mono/generic stereo. So try turning off EAX and restarting, should work like a charm after that. If not, check your drivers, If not that... Kill yourself?

[Finch_SCF]

I was having the same problem with my onboard sound this morning. Couldn't find a fix or a new driver, so I ended up popping in an old Audigy card I had lying around. That ended up fixing the problem for whatever reason...

[ArkhanJG]

Mon Ami - you can use the alchemy utility from http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/ALchemy%20for%20XFi/Home.aspx

to patch older directsound games to play in 5.1 on x-fi's in vista. It's not perfect, but it's better than a kick in the crotch.

crunchtime - I'm getting popping on my x-fi periodically, but that's a known problem with vista, 4GM of RAM, nforce chipsets and creative's drivers, as you say.

Have you tried going to onboard sound to confirm it's a problem with the audigy?

[Grav]

It is also happening with on-board sound. If you read the thread I linked to earlier in this thread you will see myself and at least one other person experiencing the same problem using realtek hd audio. Obviously not an EAX problem then as hd audio does not use it. I have now tried the on-board audio, an icemat siberia usb sound card and an original audigy card all with the same result.

[Element]

Same problem, fixes anyone?

[crunchtime]

bump.. seeing if anyone had this issue still

[BioShockWins]

Don't bump on these forums. You just don't do it here.

Ok, it might be bad hardware (such as sound card, etc.) unless of course it works fine with everything else. Did you upgrade your PC just before buying BioShock, without playing any other current games? It might be that you don't have an adiquite power supply unite (I doubt it).
You could also have a bad disk/instal/download.

But I'm sure the real issue is that it's a universal glitch. And as I've said before, a patch will be out in about a week.

[crunchtime]

I do this stuff for a living (building PC's, tech support etc) so I know what i'm doing.

I bumped it to see if anyone had found a work around and to collect a response from users that are having the same issues, into one thread.

I wanted to see if it was vista related, and it seems to be.

[ahrel]

While in the demo I did experience some odd reverb issues (it would continue to stack upon itself for sounds that should not have been reverb'd and start to make everything sound like a typical science fiction robot).

Installed the full game today, and the sound engine just dies for me... randomly. I don't know what causes it other than it must always be after a load (wether I'm loading a saved game or not). It's happened twice now in the last hour. Once I saved the game to try something stupid out, then reloaded afterward and the sound was dead.

The worst thing is exiting out doesn't fix it, I have to reboot the system -- and yeah I've checked to see if Bioshock was still running in the background. I get sound from nothing.

This second time, I made it to the location where the demo ends, it loaded up the next area, and I had no sound.

So it's happened when I loaded a save after playing for about 10 minutes. And it's happened when the game loaded a new area after playing for about 10 minutes. Right now it seems like the sound doesn't die on the initial load but if the game has to load again something happens and isn't reinitializing the sound engine.

I am running Vista 32-bit on an e6400 C2D, with 2GB 5200 DDR. My sound card is a Creative Audigy 2 (been thinking about getting a new sound card but it still works good :p), and graphics card (though it shouldn't matter) is a 7800 GTS.

[ahrel]

Really need an edit option...

Anyway, I decided to try and reinitialize my sound w/o rebooting, and it worked. I changed the speaker configuration in Windows to "Surround" and back to "5.1" and my music began playing from WMP again. Game worked with sound too. Next time it dies in game I will try alt-tabbing out and changing the speaker configuration again to see if it that works.

[Poonannie]

I'm having the same issue with a Sound Blaster Audigy SE. No problems with any other game but I do have mic issues (I've read about lots of people that have mic issues with these cards and Vista 64.

Specs if ya care.

Athlon 64 3200+, Geforce 7900 512 MB, 2 gig DDR 400 pc3200, Vista Ultimate 64 bit....what else to people post with the damn specs....bleh, that tells the story. It's the soundblaster and Creatives terrible Vista support.