soundblaster live card gone wrong!

[alanw]

iv'e just bought a new AMD 1ghz pc my new soundblaster live card keeps on cracking midway through the windows 98 startup chime, plus when i play games some sounds are not playing correctly it seems like the sound only wants to go through one channel canceling the other one out. in quake3 for example you can just about hear the footsteps and the machine gun but all other sounds ok but not great. music plays ok from the cd.
im pretty new to pc's so it could be pretty obvious answer, but ive tweaked some of the sound settings and its made no differnce!
oh, and ive just got a simple pair of yammaha desktop speakers if that helps.
thanks.

 

[clivo]

Normally, when you play music from the CD-ROM your CPU and to some extent the motherboard, are bypassed. Hence the analogue sound cable from the Cd-ROM to the soundcard.

Some motherboards allow you to dispense with this cable and will play digital sound. To check, goto control panel>multimedia>CD-MUSIC and enable digital sound. If this is OK then test with a cd playing. If the sound is poor then the motherboard is most likely the problem.

Assuming that you have loaded the drivers correctly, I suggest you move the card to a different PCI slot. AVoid the first and last.

What motherboard are you using? [sig]<p>Clive<br><a href=mailto:clive@digitalsky.co.za>clive@digitalsky.co.za</a><br><a href= > </a><br>[/sig]