Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Value

I installed this soundcard on a windows xp machine, it works fine (sort of) because the music and everything is perfect, but when the machine boots up, the volume is at absolute maximum, and booms out distortedly its that loud, but when I run media player, the volume is normal, and it is so with everything else, not shutting down, just on starting up or rebooting is when this happens

 

it would probably be easiest to disable that particular startup sound no?

 

Wow! even thoughh I live in Australia now, dont make we Lancastrians look foolish with comments like this

 

It's a 2.1 setup

 

i thought that was a decent suggestion! hahahaa

i will have a second go, seeing as the distortion is only happening at startup and at no other time- could it not be a case of program/driver loading order? it could be the creative program/driver loading into memory after the windows basic driver or something similar.

check that the creative services are set to 'automatic' and not 'delayed start', you can the services by typing 'services.msc' into the run box.

edit- have you tried installing the driver only and not the other rubbish a standard creative driver install puts on your system? i had the exact same card but i did not have the issue you have, it might be useful to know that i only did a driver install and not a software install

 

Found that the wave volume slider was set at maximum by creative. When I reduced this down it starts up with a Normal level of volume. I agree its not required for Creative to issue such crap with tere software but alas its their standards, Also I see after many moons still no decent drivers for Windows 7, well that is, there are drivers but no Equalizer, which makes it sound like tinpan alley. Think I'll be looking towards an ASUS card as its what the motherboard is anyway.

 

It's funny, because even onboard audio has a good equalizer with the drivers in Windows Vista and 7. My VIA HD Audio drivers provide a full suite of audio enhancements in Windows Vista/7. The same applies to SoundMAX and Realtek too.

The Audigy Value is a 24bit/96KHz soundcard, the specifications of this particular card are surpassed or matched (theoretically) by modern onboard audio solutions (AD1988B/VIA VT17xx/Realtek ALC 885+). On a good motherboard design (such as most Asus motherboards), they will sound every bit as good, if not better, than the Audigy Value under Windows Vista/7.

However, the Audigy Value holds value in games where Creative's alchemy software can be used to force EAX under Vista and 7, which is not possible using onboard audio solutions. If this is important to you, consider getting an Asus Xonar series sound card.