Callidor

Ok here's the shortest version of the story I can tell:

A while back, I was playing the beta for lord of the rings online, and I was having a weird crackling audio issue..so I upgraded from integrated audio to an audigy SE. that fixed the problem, but gave rise to another issue, where all the sound in Oblivion sounded distant, muffled, and echoey..sort of like EAX was trying too hard..it's very difficult to describe. After hours of playing around, I managed to fix the problem by lowering my hardware accelaration from full to basic. Not sure why, but that solved it, and I haven't given the issue any thought in months.

Just last night, however, I was playing Lord of the rings Online, and I discovered the issue..but in a VERY isolated instance. The footstep sound effect on one very particular type of ground surface sounds the way Oblivion used to. I tried a whole lot of things..updating drivers, re-installing drivers, system restores (because i never noticed the problem before), messing with EAX...nothing worked.

The Audigy SE is a really low-end sound card, so I'm considering maybe just getting a $70-ish X-Fi one. If I had any sort of guarantee that this would work, I'd probably just go for it, but I don't know..I don't want to throw out money and have the same issue. (Also, I'd like to be able to keep my hardware accel. at full..think this would make it work?)

Any thoughts?

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Laptop
Sager NP5793 T9300 Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz, 4GB RAM, Nvidia 8800M GTX, 250GB 5400RPM, 3dMark 06 score: 9168

Desktop
Alienware Area 51 3500 2.8GHz Pentium4, 2.5Gig DDR2 SDRAM @533mhz (2x256 + 2x1gb), Nvidia Geforce 7950 GT 512MB, Sound Blaster Audigy SE

oscaryu1

Hardware acceleration in the GFX or sound? Then the effects down an bit, see what happens.

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