Well, after beating my head against this problem for the last 8 hours, I’m finally turning for help. So, the story: After nearly 5 years of faithful service, I decided I finally could put it off no longer and upgraded my video card. The new nVidia GeForce 6600 works like a charm. Absolutely beautiful in the highest video settings of Neverwinter Nights. However, after installing the new video card, the old (same age as the old video card) Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card does not want to work for internal sound. No audio in NWN and no audio in iTunes. After fighting with a couple other problems as well, I decided to just face the unpleasant task of reinstalling the OS. So, I get the OS reinstalled and go about reinstalling all the other stuff–drivers, software, SP2, other updates, and so on–and make sure to not install any other audio drivers. The motherboard comes with onboard sound, which I have never used because the onboard jacks don’t work with my speaker system. As a result, I made sure not to install the drivers for the onboard audio in an attempt to cut off any possible driver conflicts. However, something called NVIDIA nForce Audio Codec Interface did manage to slip in. Disabling this did not seem to help. Still getting no audio in iTunes and also
no audio in WinAmp. However, trying to run a CD in WinAmp did give me a more helpful error message: “Bad DirectSound driver. Please install proper drivers or select another device in configuration. Error code: 80070057.” Also interesting is that iTunes tries to play a file or a CD track, but it takes it several seconds to advance one second in the song. It was doing that before I disabled the audio codec interface.
So, here’s what I’ve tried. The sound card is OEM, so I’ve tried the last set of drivers from Dell. I’ve tried the somewhat newer drivers from Turtle Beach, both the signed and unsigned ones. I know that the sound card itself is fine, as the external sound coming from the TV card plays just fine. As far as I know, I want to use the WDM drivers, not the VxD ones. I have not tried going back to the old video card because, quite frankly, that is not an option. I’m starting to wonder if I should just bite the bullet and upgrade to a new sound card. Installing in a clean OS did not fix the problems. I’ve had this kind of problem before with this sound card and the onboard sound but last time I was able to fix it. That hasn’t happened this time. Anyone have any ideas?
It seems likely that your video card has a hardware resource conflict with your sound card. These types of problems cannot be solved by replacing drivers - instead, you have to look in places like the device manager and possibly the BIOS.
The first thing I would do is use the device manager to look for resource conflicts. The device manager works differently in different versions of Windows - in XP it shows a yellow exclamation point or a red X next to a malfunctioning device. In some other versions of Windows you may have to look at the resources each device is trying to use and look for conflicts yourself. I would start with IRQs, since a sound card typically uses two of them.
The Turtle Beach web site has an FAQ for the Santa Cruz here:
My apologies for not mentioning the OS. It’s WinXP. As for disabling the onboard sound, did it. No help there. Windows is not reporting an IRQ conflict and I’m not seeing one looking at them myself. The game port (the MIDI/joystick port) is having a conflict, but I doubt that would have any effect on the performance of the sound card itself. The Turtle Beach card is the higher IRQ-it’s at 18 and the NVidia is at 16.
If you’re getting a problem with actual error messages (as opposed to just no sound), then cabling is unlikely to be the (only) problem. I don’t have access to an XP machine right now, but you should check “Sound and Multimedia” or whatever in the control panel to make sure outputs are set as they should be.
Also, make sure you’ve got the latest version of DirectX installed (9c IIRC), and run “dxdiag”. That may shed some light on your DirectSound error message.
Well, the dxdiag gives two error messages. When trying to test DirectSound, the message is “Failure at step 3 (DirectSoundCreate): HRESULT = 0x80070057 (Invalid argument(s))” and for trying to test DirectMusic, the message is “Failure at step 5 (Creating the IDirectMusicPort): HRESULT = 0x80004005 (Generic failure)”
I suppose I could try reenabling the onboard sound to see if the problem is with the sound card specifically or a general problem.
Whatever it was was a specific sound card problem. I still haven’t found a way to fix it. Looking deeper into the IRQs, I am seeing that two different IEEE 1394 controllers are on the same IRQ as the sound card. Do you guys know of any way of setting either the sound card or the FireWire controllers to a different IRQ?
Punch through the submenus of the hardware listing for the 1394 to the “resources” tab and see if the IRQs are re-assignable
. They may or may not be. If you’re not using these firewire ports (assuming they’re motherboard based and not on a separate PCI card) defeat them in the BIOS if possible. Beyond this see if there are jumper options on the MB itself for the 1394 IRQ assignments.
Well, I finally solved the dang problem. I did what I should’ve done in the first place and tried putting it into a different PCI slot (I currently have two empty). It worked. I don’t know if it was a problem with that particular slot in terms of resource allocation or because the case of the GPU in the AGP slot was coming dang close to touching the back of the sound card or what, but it’s up and running again with all the same old quirks. I never did get the NVRAM cleared. Time to play some NWN in all its full graphics, surround sound goodness.