Cracking & popping with Turtle Beach Riviera

[shortylickens]

I purchased the PCI Turtle Beach Riviera Sound Card from Newegg.com about 6 months ago. Overall I am very happy with it and am suprised that such a reasonably priced card can sound so much better than my Audigy 1 from Creative Labs.
However, I have recently been playing an older game called Total Anihilation: Kingdoms and have been experiencing problems with the music and sound effects. There is a constant popping/crackling noise with any audio being played. The game has no audio controls besides volume and I do not believe it uses EAX, A3D or any other sort of 3D sound. I think it uses basic Direct Sound accelleration when available, but I am not sure. The game is patched to the latest version (3.0). When I used my Audigy Platinum 1 it never had popping or cracking with this particular game. Same thing with the SoundBlaster PCI 512 or the cheap Realtek audio chips found on some motherboards.

This is the only game I own with this problem. On their support site it is suggested I update my drivers, which I did but infortunately the Riviera Drivers are from 2007 and thats it.
It also suggests I lower my video card accelleration in the Windows Display tab, because sometimes that can cause audio problems. I did it, but it did not fix any audio problems and eventually caused the in game display to disappear. I did try using their personal audio mixer to set the sound from 5.1 channel to 2.0 channel. It helped marginally. I still hear crackling but its not as loud or frequent. Unfortunately its still noticable and prevents me from enjoying the game.

All other system drivers are up to date. I am using Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 3.
I have an Athlon 64 5600+ dual core running at stock speed. Nothing on my system is under or overclocked.
An ECS socket AM2+ motherboard with the nForce 7 chipset. Onboard audio is disabled through the BIOS and does not appear in my Device Manager.
2 gigs of PC 3500 RAM.
Radeon 4870 with latest drivers.
Have done a manual scan for viruses and spyware/adware. No anti-virus is running right now.
There are no programs running in the backround other than Windows default stuff and their audio mixer program.

What are the other issues that may cause audio popping/crackling?
Do I need to find out if this game uses DirectSound or OpenAL?
If so, how do I determine that?
Are there special versions of DirectSound or OpenAL that I can force on my system?
Why does shifting from 5.1 audio to 2.0 help improve the audio quality slightly?

Any other info you need? Please ask!!
I really dont want to go back to Creative Labs just for one issue with one game. By the same token I dont wish to spend 100 bucks on a sound card from someone else.

EDIT:
I sent an email with this exact same info to Turtle Beach tech support a week ago. No response after a follow up email.

 

[Juddog]

The issue is with the nForce chipset. You will notice crackling and popping on any soundcard that uses an nforce 6x chipset or 7x chipset.

If you bought an x-fi you would end up noticing the same thing. It has to do with the way that the nforce chipset handles its bus. I have an x-fi and a nforce 650 and noticed the same thing, worked for months trying to fix it and gave up, the only thing that scaled back the issue for me was uninstalling the motherboard software (of course I left on SATA drivers, etc., just uninstalled the motherboard management software).

If you check out the creative forums there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of threads about the crackling, hissing and popping noises from people using nforce chipsets and additional sound cards. From what I understand, the issue stems from how nvidia routes the traffic over the motherboard, especially motherboards with SLI. Basically the motherboard briefly pauses some traffic to give priority to other traffic, and this builds up over time on the sound card to cause the noise.

For example, put on some music, put it up decently loud, then open up a web page and start scrolling using the middle mouse button and see if the crackling becomes more pronounced. Turtle Beach, Creative, etc. are not going to do anything about it because there is nothing they can do; it's a motherboard issue. For this reason alone I have pondered moving away from the nforce platform, but then I would lose my SLI capabilities so for now I am stuck with it.

 

[shortylickens]

So how come I never had this issue while using an Audigy 1 card in any games?

Why does it only happen with this game when using this card? The Riviera does just fine in all other games, most of which require more RAM, CPU and VGU power.

I dont have the motherboard management software installed so I cant uninstall it.

Maybe I should try using onboard audio instead.

 

[Juddog]

Originally posted by: shortylickens
So how come I never had this issue while using an Audigy 1 card in any games?

Why does it only happen with this game when using this card? The Riviera does just fine in all other games, most of which require more RAM, CPU and VGU power.

I dont have the motherboard management software installed so I cant uninstall it.

Maybe I should try using onboard audio instead.

Using the onboard audio is the best thing to do for this. The nforce onboard audio is actually pretty decent as far as onboard audio is concerned.

It only seems to be the newer generation of sound cards that have a large amount of traffic that cause the issue; basically any high end sound card will do it.

There are tweaks that are suggested by Creative and others to try and stop the symptoms, but personally I have tried every one I could read about with no luck. In my case I know it's not the sound card because I put it in a non-nforce motherboard and it sounded great. Go over to the creative forums and there are more detailed explanations.

 

[shortylickens]

I went with the onboard.
NOT my first choice but I'd settle for 2nd rate audio that doesnt pop & crack.
Shame that nForce has actually gone down in quality since the Socket A days.

 

[Juddog]

Originally posted by: shortylickens
I went with the onboard.
NOT my first choice but I'd settle for 2nd rate audio that doesnt pop & crack.
Shame that nForce has actually gone down in quality since the Socket A days.

Yeah I agree... I was very disappointed to find that my x-fi card sounded like hell after I spent over a hundred bucks on it because of the stupid motherboard. At least on a positive note the motherboard built in sound is above par compared to non-nforce onboard sound systems.