This simple procedure I read somewhere makes alot of sense and worked amazingly well on my Audigy! There used to be a loud hiss, then after I upgraded to Audigy 2 drivers it was significantly reduced, now that I've applied this little trick it's 100% gone, even with low impedance cans and volumes turned to max!
1) Open volume control (officially titled "Play Control" - this is the little speaker that appears in your task bar (bottom right under the clock) on most people's computers. Double click to open it.
1b) If the little speaker does not appear in your taskbar, go to the "Sound and Multimedia" control panel and on the first screen click the "Show Volume Control on the taskbar" box at the bottom of the screen. Now you should see the little speaker in your task bar, open it (double click).
2) While in "Play Control", first go under the options menu and select the first choice "Properties". Make Sure the radio button "Playback" is selected (not Recording). Now in the box labelled "Show the following volume controls:" check every single box enabling every possible playback output (remember to scroll down and check ALL of them!).
3) Now go click okay, your Play control window should be very large now! Now mute all of them (check the mute box) except "Play Control Balance" (first one) and "Wave/MP3 Balance" and (if you need it) "CD Digital" (always mute CD-Audio! this control is for analog CD volume and is very noisy! The dacs inside most cd-roms are even worse than creative ones to my ears (yes - even with the resampling), so pass the digital info through your IDE cable). For me this was pretty dramatic. I had the volume jacked up through my headphones so I could clearly hear the hiss, and as I muted all the outputs the hiss kept getting quieter and quieter until it was completely gone!
4) You can go back under options->properties and disable all the controls you don't need, they will stay muted.
Remember to mute everything but
Why creative cards don't default to this is beyond me. The difference is very noticable not just turning up the volume, but during music as well (noise floor much less noticable, only noise comes from the recording!).
I know this has already been suggested in this thread, but most people who have "muted everything" really haven't muted everything and the difference is night and day.
EDIT: if you use creative's annoying mixer, I don't know how to make this procedure work. Creative's software department has always been it's weak point (obvious when new drivers can improve the sound as much as the hacked Audigy 2 drivers can!) therefore I only install the drivers for any Creative card, none of the crappy programs creative provides that I personally have no use for and that suck up system resources like a vacuum.
-dd3mon
