Soundblaster software beware

Hi

I have been reading on here for months and received my M14X yesterday. It was quick. Ordered on Dec. 28th, received a shipping date for the 12th. On Jan. 3rd I decided to check my order and it said it had shipped, new delivery date Jan. 5, cool I thought. Checked the tracking number on the morning of the 4th and it said it was on the truck in San Diego for delivery. Sure enough, at 1:30pm Fedex pulls up and it's here.

On to the software. I ordered this and knew I shouldn't but oh well. I installed it from the disc that came with it. I played around with all the settings and wasn't really thrilled with it. I was mostly hoping to get higher volume but no luck, just gimmicks.

When I shut down and powered up later my realtek audio card was not recognized. It had to reinstall the driver every time I logged off and booted back up. I tried uninstalling the creative files but no luck. Finally I went to restore and there was a restore point right before I installed those files. Restored to that point and all is well so it had to be that software causing the problem. Just wanted to let others know. I'm sure this doesn't happen to everyone but I didn't like it enough to really care. It's gone for good.

This rig is so friggin awesome. Its just a blast to play with and learn all of its capabilities. It's my first new laptop in 4 yrs., which is a long time for me.

Oh, by the way, thanks to all you guys on here for posting informative information that helped me decide that this was the rig for me. Yes, even with the heat issues etc.

 

The soundblaster software not going to give you higher volume, because that is not what it for, it is for improving the sound, not increasing the sound. however I used to think like you, thinking that I can get a better and higher sound out of it but I'm wrong which causing me a subwoofer blown, and that is not once but twice, thankfully the laptop has warranty otherwise it would have been quite costly though.

 

i had the same troubles with card not beeing recognized, reinstalling drivers etc...

i think downloading the official dell driver for m14x realtek and the cd from soundblaster fixed it. was a bit tricky tho to find out.

 

I un-installed the realtek software and actually left the soundblaster software on. The soundblaster has better (virtual surround) in my opinion and I like the control panel. If you check the individual speaker settings for 2.1 or 5.1 surround soundblaster offers more features and Realtek doesn't even allow 2.1 (2 plus sub). So... I am pretty happy with soundblaster and bye to Realtek software.

 

for me the soundblaster stuff just added itself upon the realtek stuff. without the realtek driver i couldnt even install the SB stuff.

 

Thanks

Lancer

The problem I had was when I booted up there was an X over the little speaker in the task bar. When clicked, it said no sound card driver was installed. I think you need a sound card driver to use soundblaster. It would ask if I wanted to repair it and it would find the driver and reinstall. When I powered off and back on again, the X was there and I had to reinstall again. This happened many times as I tried to fix it until I restored.

 

ibill - sorry to hear about that. Ill take a little closer look at mine to see what exact driver is being used and what version of the SB software.

 

Soundblaster is just a software that enhances the audio signals being sent to speakers. I am not sure if you can notice the diffrence between stock realtek drivers and soundblaster driver through laptop speakers. But once you hook them to audio setup like 5.1, or even a 2.1 audio system, the difference will be there. But again, its a software enhancement over same hardware in each machine.

 

Soundblaster software is not meant for speakers. High-end ones, yes, but not the horrible setup the M14x - and indeed most laptops - are stuck with.

Plug in a pair of decent headphones, and you'll see why it's there.

 

I guess it is just personal preference. I was using good headphones. The Shure E5C, these are $500 headphones although you can find them now for around $300. I suspect I should have evaluated the soundblaster more but once I realized every time I booted up my sound card was gone I freeked out and just wanted it off my system.

Thanks for the replys. Now that I know how to get my soundcard back I'll do reinstall from the disk.

 

Driver shows to be Realtek - driver date 1/14/2011 version 6.0.1.6291
Driver details shows loads of dll files in realtek audio folder and windows\system32 which is pretty standard. The creative console launcher shows version 2.61.33 (installed from CD/DVD). Like others have mentioned, this is purely software driven.

 

The M14x's speakers are pretty decent, actually. And yeah, there IS a difference in the sound, both with the built-in speakers and headphones - anyone curious enough can just turn it off and turn it back on; the effect should be pretty easy to distinguish.

The SB effects seem to affect game sound too (from my experience), which is somewhat interesting. The virtual surround and environment settings are also fun to play around with.