X-Fi Vista64 driver and digital output are fooked?

I went and installed Vista64 a few days ago and now the digital out on my X-Fi is unavailable. I have an EMU 0404 USB connected to it via digital coax and now can't use it unless I use the USB port instead. Anyone else have X-Fi on Vista64 and have the same issue? Just want to make sure I am blaming the right people as the suspected cause of this issue. Of courser I am talking about Creative. If my suspicions are correct then it's goodbye to X-Fi and will be looking for a new soundcard that has working digital out driver for Vista64.

Did you try the beta ones they recently posted?

It wouldn't surprise me if this is just an issue with the X-Fi drivers in Vista.

x-FI does have issues because creative doesn't have any love for Vista x86/x64

I had an x-fi and tried to connect it to my new receiver. I couldn't select any output on the spdif. funny part was when I selected the analog output in vista, then I got sound from the spdif .Only stereo though, even when I tried to play a movie with an dts or DD track, I got no sound when selected spdif... and when selected analog in the config of powerdvd if got sound thru spdif,..

I had an another problem, the right speaker was making crackin sounds , but only with certain frequencies (mid-tones, voices)...

first I thought it was my receiver, but now I know the x-fi card is borked, so I kicked it out.
am using my on board spdif now, works like a charm.

Now I am waiting for the new asus soundcard.

I searched on the internet, and there are many problems with the spdif output, some people can solve it but uninstalling all the drivers and stuff from creative. but with me it , I kept having the problems

thinking about to put a youtube movie, put a hole in the x-fi card thats what I think of creative now

X-FI has mad driver issues and creative doesn't care, there are thousands of people with over 4gb of ram and a nforce 500-600 mobo, in vista x64 it cause the sound to have lots of noise, crackling and popping. Its worst than listening to a bad AM radio station.

I had to just buy a whole new mobo.

I just downloaded that beta driver a couple of days ago but haven't installed it yet. Will go try it now and see if it fixes the issue. I'm thinking of getting the HT Omega Striker soundcard. I read it is a good soundcard, better than X-Fi, and is cheaper too. Has Dolby Surround and DTS over SPDIF too. I don't need no steenkin' EAX on Vista. Just hope Creative drivers don't give me grief uninstalling them cleanly like they usually do if I do switch to HT Omega.

Well, just got back from installing the beta X-Fi Vista64 driver and the EMU still picks up no external signal over SPDIF of the X-Fi. Vista also says there is a problem when I try to play a test tone over SPDIF. I can still use the EMU by using its own driver and using USB connection but over SPDIF of X-Fi is NFG. Well, all is not lost as the SPDIF on my Chaintech AV-710 works in XP so will play mp3's from that computer only for now until I dump this POS X-Fi and get the HT Omega Striker. Better make sure that has working SPDIF on Vista64 first though.

Oooppsie, someone in the OS forum just pointed out the error I was making. I'm happy to say that SPDIF works fine on X-Fi in Vista64. Last time I was using Vista before installing Vista64 I had a Chaintech AV-710 installed and it's driver settings were much easier to get to than Creative's Vista driver settings. I had fogot about the "secret" setting menu in the Creative Vista drivers. All I had to do was this to get SPDIF working.

"Right-click on the volume icon and go to playback devices, double click on speakers, go to the custom tab, then click the enable digital IO box."

I got the new PCI-E X-Fi Titanium because of the 4GB RAM snap-crackle-pop issues. Most people thought it was due to bad implmentations of the PCI bus; something to do with bus saturation between modern graphics cards, lots of RAM, and a low-latency audio device.

This PCI-E sound card works great in solving that issue. It has a few minor flaws, but hopefully they'll be corrected.

It has Dolby Digital, so I'm using a toslink optical cable and getting 5.1 sound using my Z-5500 speakers.

Yea, I will make sure my next soundcard is PCI-E. But then I run into the issue of Asus putting the PCI-E slot right next to the vieo card which is not good due to heat and possible EMI issues. I always like to put my soundcard in the slot furthest away from the vidoe card.

@ Balthazor

"It has Dolby Digital, so I'm using a toslink optical cable and getting 5.1 sound using my Z-5500 speakers."

you have tested this? true 5.1 not just 2.1?

MargaretB said:

@ Balthazor


you have tested this? true 5.1 not just 2.1?

Click to expand...

I have tested - getting 5.1 in music (using CMSS-3D on Vista x64), in testing (multi-channel speaker testing), and in games (so far only EAX w/ ALchemy games tested, specifically Warcraft 3, FEAR, HL2: Lost Coast, and Oblivion.)

Seems to work fine... except the darn windows volume/mute controls don't affect the audio output when using Dolby Digital over optical. If you disable the decoder and use unencoded digital optical output, or use analog connections, the windows volume controls work ok. But the dolby digital encoding does something funky.

It kind of looks like the dolby digital implementation is outputting to a virtual device that is not 'hooked' to the windows volume control

For the time being I'm using my Logitech Z-5500's remote to do volume control and muting. For the record, application-level audio controls work fine (windows media player, games) but the master windows volume control (or the Creative console volume control, which is essentially the same thing) do NOT affect the audio output when using Dolby Digital over optical.

I've written Creative about it, and am going through the various levels of tech support now. I'm sure it will be fixed.... sometime.