GA-EX38-DQ6 Onboard Audio (ALC889A) Equalizer, treble/bass, games sound bad

[Jackyl]

Gigabyte GA-EX38-DQ6
Vista Premium x64
Realtek R1.90 driver

I was hoping that this new HD-Audio codec would be good enough, as I had too much problem with Creative cards in the past. The HD-Audio sounds okay for music and videos, but Realtek and [COLOR=blue! important][FONT=verdana, geneva, lucida, 'lucida grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif][COLOR=blue! important][FONT=verdana, geneva, lucida, 'lucida grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Gigabyte[/FONT][/FONT][/COLOR][/COLOR] don't give an equalizer, nor even bass/treble controls. All I have are equalizer "presets" (Rock/Pop/etc...). There is no way to tweak them to my satifaction. Come on Realtek and Gigabyte! Get your act together! There is no excuse for not having custom equalizer or treble/bass controls in Vista x64!

Coming from an Audigy 2, this on-board audio sounds terrible in games. Games sound very flat, with no acoustics or reverb. Tried old games like Diablo 2, and newer like Oblivion. All of those games sound very flat and terrible in my opinion.

Anyone have any suggestions, before I go out and buy an Asus Xonar or other sound card?



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[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-EX38-DQ6 Onboard Audio (ALC889A) Equalizer, treble/bass, games sound bad

Have you uninstalled ALL sound drivers MS ones too, then installed the latest ones direct from realtek? You may have to go in device manager and check for all sound related drivers and remove, and you may have to do that in safe mode to stop windows from reinstalling them

If not, do that >>>
Realtek

And then be sure to NOT install the ones via windows update

[Jackyl]

Re: GA-EX38-DQ6 Onboard Audio (ALC889A) Equalizer, treble/bass, games sound bad

After some more research on other forums, people are saying this is a Realtek/Vista issue. Custom Equalizer is only available on XP. For some reason, Realtek did not include equalizer with Vista x32/x64, only presets.

Looks like for games, I'll have to buy an add-on X-Fi or Xonar sound card, to get spatial and 3D effects. Games just don't sound ambient enough with this onboard solution. I'm using two speakers, and in my situation, I do not have room for a 7.1 speaker setup for surround sound.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-EX38-DQ6 Onboard Audio (ALC889A) Equalizer, treble/bass, games sound bad

Works in vista on my P35-DS4. But I may not be sure what you specifically mean. But my Eq is working

[neilthecellist]

Re: GA-EX38-DQ6 Onboard Audio (ALC889A) Equalizer, treble/bass, games sound bad

Works in vista on my P35-DS4. But I may not be sure what you specifically mean. But my Eq is working

He means CUSTOM equalizer.



Only there can you actually MAKE custom changes. Right now there are only presets on the Vista 64 edition.

[last0ne]

Re: GA-EX38-DQ6 Onboard Audio (ALC889A) Equalizer, treble/bass, games sound bad

No, don't use the predefine. Here is what you do. Reset the equalizer.

for bass, crank up the 100hz frequency
for treble, crank up the 12k,14k,16k

I hope that helps.

[Jackyl]

Re: GA-EX38-DQ6 Onboard Audio (ALC889A) Equalizer, treble/bass, games sound bad

lastOne, In Vista 64-bit, we only have predefine. There is NO custom equalizer.

I'm not waiting around for Realtek. The chip doesn't support real-time 3D positional effects or EAX in games. So games will never sound good, like they did on my old Creative card.

I bought an Asus Xonar that I'm going to try out. Hopefully it will bring life back to games. I just don't understand how everyone else can't hear the difference between this onboard solution and an add-in card. Without the reverb and positional effects, games do not sound the best.

[Bad Cyborg]

Re: GA-EX38-DQ6 Onboard Audio (ALC889A) Equalizer, treble/bass, games sound bad

No, don't use the predefine. Here is what you do. Reset the equalizer.

for bass, crank up the 100hz frequency
for treble, crank up the 12k,14k,16k

I hope that helps.

It sounds like you either misunderstood the subject, or are using a different Vista driver than the ones we got. Please post a screenshot of your EQ setting, and please make sure it's from Vista, not XP. And if that indeed is the case, please upload your driver to a file hosting site. Many thanks in advance.

[DiaperGravy]

Re: GA-EX38-DQ6 Onboard Audio (ALC889A) Equalizer, treble/bass, games sound bad

Well, here's my 2 cents about using a creative card in this situation on my P35-DS4. I dunno if the same applies for you being an X38 chipset DQ6 board, but my experience....

1) The P35-DS4 did not like my x-fi extreme gamer.... I had these random boot cycling problems that seems to be commonly posted on here. After finally getting fed up for reasons I'll explain in a sec and pulling the card out, no more boot cycling at all. In both XP and Vista the card would would act pretty flakey untill finally not working at all. Seems like it would work fine for awhile, then resuming from standby (or sleep in vista) at some random time, would get no sound till reboot. Once that started, it was a recurring thing untill not even a reboot or cold boot would get sound back. No amount of un-installing and cleaning any trace of creative drivers with a driver cleaner, then trying to re-install would bring it back, except for a fresh reformat. This is with no other settings changed or other software added/removed or anything like that too when it did decide to stop working...and with both OS's. I tried the last 3 driver versions, all the same, allthough the latest one lasted the longest. First 2 sometimes wouldnt last a day.

2) With Vista...there is no EAX for directX 10 sound natively or through creative's driver even. They have that OpenAL package for Vista which is supposed to bring back positional audio and all in games under Vista, but I dont think it did anything at all as no game I tried sounded any different with it vs without it and certainly wasnt the same as full EAX under XP. Frankly between the x-fi and the onboard ALC889 in games running on Vista, they both sounded the exact same to me on my Klipsch 4.1's.

My 2 cents...