Audio hardware showing up as emulated (and annoying hissing while playing music)

[majorid]

My x-fi xtrememusic has recently started exhibiting an annoying hissing while listening to music or gaming. I can escape it with kernel streaming in foobar, so I'm sure it's not a hardware problem, but during games it is impossible to avoid. For some reason, it as well as my integrated audio have started showing up as "emulated" in foobar (see image. The x-fi is my default sound driver.). The integrated audio also suffers from exactly the same hissing, which I believe is not related to its hardware quality.

The only thing I have done audio-wise recently was uninstalling a modem driver (it was removed physically long ago), because for some reason the modem was showing up in my audio devices and in foobar, with the "emulated" notation. Does anyone have the slightest idea what may be going on here? I'm thought that maybe a driver upgrade would solve it, but then I found that the integrated produces the same hissing....

 

[vegaman]

Maybe it's a directx problem?
Or, I'm not sure exactly where it is in Vista, but in XP: Control Panel>Sounds and Audio Devices>Volume>Speaker Settings>Advanced>Performance, and make sure hardware acceleration and sample rate conversion are turned to full and best.

 

[majorid]

They were at full and best quality, and changing them back and forth did nothing. It is seeming more and more like a directx problem, as dxdiag tells me that the card is not capable of hardware buffering.

Update: According to System Info, the x-fi was sharing an IRQ with my graphics card, so I moved it to another PCI slot. Now I get no sound output at all, but according to my media players and games everything is fine.

 

[majorid]

I disabled the integrated audio to no result. But dxdiag is scaring me:
-------------
Sound Devices
-------------
Description: SB X-Fi Audio [9C00] (emulated)
Default Sound Playback: Yes
Default Voice Playback: Yes
Hardware ID: PCI\VEN_1102&DEV_0005&SUBSYS_00211102&REV_00
Manufacturer ID: 1
Product ID: 100
Type: Emulated
Driver Name:
Driver Version:
Driver Attributes:
WHQL Logo'd:
Date and Size:
Other Files:
Driver Provider: Creative
HW Accel Level: Full
Cap Flags: 0x2F
Min/Max Sample Rate: 100, 100000
Static/Strm HW Mix Bufs: 0, 0
Static/Strm HW 3D Bufs: 0, 0
HW Memory: 0
Voice Management: No
EAX(tm) 2.0 Listen/Src: No, No
I3DL2(tm) Listen/Src: No, No
Sensaura(tm) ZoomFX(tm): No
Registry: OK
Sound Test Result: Not run