Vista sound cards

[ebeattie]

So, any ideas when we will see designed for Vista sound cards?

Want to upgrade my audio, but I dont want to buy anything and creative isnt doing anything to introduce Vista issue free cards.

 

[hardcandy2]

IMHO, it may be better to wait and see if anyone is designing a new card to take advantage of DX10.
All I find on various sound card sites is "Vista drivers are being worked on by our team". So apparently they are all having problems with Vista and the new audio API's. But at least Reltek has a newer HD audio driver available since last week for the builtin audio. Works pretty well.

 

[Ghouler]

Originally posted by: ebeattie
Want to upgrade my audio, but I dont want to buy anything

Huh? Tou want better sound but you do not want to buy new hardware. That's tough then.
But I guess you could perhaps re-convert your CDs into loseless WMA files to make them sound better...Or I did not quite understand...

As for "Designed for Vista" logo this would be just marketing gimmick IMO. If there is driver for piece of hardware it works. You do not new capacitors and resistors on PCB just because there is new operating system, or do you?

VISTA DRIVERS

Sound Blaster has full Vista drivers in works. So far they have released betas only. M-Audio and other companies all claim they "work on drivers"
Maybe they think Vista is not going to replace XP?

And in all fairness - perhaps they are right?
I mean: tt took 3 revisions of Windows to really replace Windows 98. Look:
Windows Millenium did not make it. Windows 2000 was more successful, but it was only XP that really pushed Windows 98 out. I think XP might stay around for at least 2 more years.

Okay, here a few links that demonstrate sound drivers' readiness for Vista:

Montego Vista drivers (Turtle Beach) - no driver

M-Audio - no Vista drivers for sound cards

Terratec - no Vista drivers for sound cards

Auzentech - Vista beta drivers available

Creative Vista beta drivers available

From this you can see only Creative and Auzentech have Vista drivers. Both only betas. Creative promises full release by the end of the month if I understand their chart well, we shall see...

 

[ebeattie]

What I meant by I didnt want to buy was I didnt want to buy anything now, with the possibility that there might be some new OpenAL cards coming out with stable drivers. I just hope it comes out soon. As finiky as I have heard the Vista OEM CD being about hardware, I want to keep my hardware swaps to a minimum.

 

[Keleka]

I'm waiting for a sound card thats designed for Windows Vista not made to simply just get by like Creative is doing. They have always been far behind the driver curve on new OS's..

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Have you thought about just upgrading your speakers / headphones while you wait for Vista drivers to come around for more soundcards?

 

[n3m3515]

Montego Vista drivers do exist. Kindof...
When I did the last clean install of Vista for a new machine with the Montego DDL card
here is how I got it to work...

1) After loading the OS, do a Search Online For Driver to get the windows update driver
2) go to the CMEDIA forum and download the Vista Beta driver (top of the PCI Audio forum sticky) for the 8768+
3) install the driver using the setup file in the download
4) Open the CMI Media control panel applet and configure.
I am using this with a DTS/DD decoder and am using the optical output to the receiver.
To get this to work properly I had to set the default Playback device to the analog line, then go into CMI applet and set for SPDIF Out and 5.1 speakers. Also select for Dolby Digital Live, not 48khz.

Works like a charm and encodes to the receiver as Dolby Digital on the fly.
Only problem I have is in Media Center.
If I do a speaker setup and select TOSLINK and 5.1, the test tones did not work, to bypass this I setup speakers to RCA Mini Plug (headphone plug) and then set for 5.1 and all was fine.
You may have to play with the Speaker applet and the CMI Media applet configurations, depending on your setup.

N3M3515

 

[HannibalX]

I was unable to make my CL SB Live 5.1 card work in Vista. That was the only problem I had with the OS.

I have been meaning to get a new sound card for several years.

 

[elcamino74ss]

My x-fi extreme audio works fine. the fluff software from Creative does not work but drivers work fine. I did have some initial trouble with the mic/audio in but its all working now.