SB Live 5.1 & ASIO4ALL issue

[Parn]

Yesterday I decided to put one of my Linux box into dual boot with XP so that I can play some SF3(StarForce 3.x) protected games. I wanted better sound than onboard so my old spare SB Live! 5.1 Digital was installed.

I've always been using Winamp + !mpg_123 + out_asio to listen to music on my X-FI and the results are great. I know Live(EMU10K1) is capable of ASIO and there is a 3rd party driver called kX project for it. I tried kX project before and it was unstable(don't know if it's any better now), so I've gone with the latest Creative driver this time. In order to enable ASIO with Creative driver, I installed ASIO4ALL v2.8. Now when I try to play any mp3 in winamp, I get a buzzing noise in the background. I've been playing with the settings in ASIO4ALL control panel (changing latency, buffer sample number, enable/disable resamling 44.1 <-> 48), but the problem remains. Could someone please help me to find out what I'm doing wrong here? Is this a hardware or driver issue?

The spec of this PC is listed as "Moss" in my sig. Thanks in advance.

[nub]

Depending on how the buzzing sounds this is either due to a bad cable or electronic interference.

Usually, if it's electrical interference, the buzz will sound different during the times that you hard drive is being accessed. This is often what creates more buzz and what tips off the issue being electrical interference. There is very little you can do about this most of the times as it's likely interference affecting the soundcard itself.

The other issue would be bad cables. If the hum is always there and it doesn't change sound at all other than whether you're playing something or not, then it's bad cables. Or, if not a bad cable, then a bad ground, which means there's an issue with your power source.

The other thing would be noise from one of the inputs. So if the ASIO drivers are enabling monitoring on the inputs, it might just be a matter of disabling the inputs, though I don't know how this works with ASIO4ALL or winamp.

The other thing would be if you're just hearing the mp3 as it sounds. MP3's are often full of artifacts and even the higher bitrates can have artifacting going on. This happens more in the high end of the human hearing range but other artifacts can be present also. If you have an eq engaged to extreme values, you might just be bringing out the worst in your mp3's.

[Parn]

I just checked all the inputs and muted them again. Still the buzzing remains. The card works fine with directsound output, but once switched to ASIO the buzzing starts. It affects all types of music I have including mp3, ogg and wma.

[midyxadryl]

The problem youre having is your SB Live. It doesnt support 44.1KHz output. Direct Sound plays all audio at 48KHz, which is why youre not getting the problem while using it. ASIO on any Creative card pre X-Fi will be pretty useless because of the limitations of those cards.

[Parn]

I've tried resampling 44.1 to 48 with both out_asio.dll plugin or ASIO4ALL itself (in order to bypass the inferior built-in resampling), unfortunately neither works. However I've read other people have had success with both Live and Audigy using ASIO (including Creative ASIO, kX project and ASIO4ALL).

Edit: ASIO is working fine now. I tried resampling in out_asio.dll again and also increased buffer to 512 samples in ASIO4ALL control panel. After all the changes, I restarted winamp and now everything is working. I guess ASIO4ALL doesn't apply new settings on the fly and requires the application to be restarted.

[midyxadryl]

Have you ever thought of kernel streaming? When I was on an Audigy2 it sounded better than ASIO. If you use Foobar2000 get the SSRC resampler and the kernel streaming plugin, set it up for 48KHz playback at ultra quality.

[Parn]

I've heard of kernel streaming which also allows bypassing the dreadful kmixer. I went for ASIO because of lower latency, but then I suppose latency is only critical for recording. I may give kernel streaming a try. BTW that otachan's out_asio.dll also uses SSRC for resampling, so I expect the quality to be the same as SSRC with kernel streaming.

[nub]

For playback you can have an extremely high buffer size and it should only affect your computer having less of a load. Not that 2-channel audio playback is an extensive processing task but a lower latency setting will give you more processing load and no benefits are far as playback is concerned.

The only issue with large buffers and audio is if you're recording, a high buffer can give you sync issues. Low buffers (latency) are useful when you need to monitor an incoming signals and are processing it inside your computer and then having the effect play back at the same time. The other time when a high buffer size is a negative is if you're using virtual instruments where you press a key on a keyboard controller and you trigger a virtual instrument to play back the sound. Too high of a buffer causes a delayed triggering of the note due to the buffer.

I wouldn't worry about it if it was just a matter of playback though.