re-Prodigied Chaintech faltering with disk activity

[chaotic33]

I got a a chaintech 710 from the VS in order to achieve high end audio from the pc using kernel streaming in foobar.
I turned it into a prodigy because kernel streaming was unavailable.
It ran nice on flac apart from about one glitch per album (a faltering sound as loud as the music making you afraid of the next accurence rather than enjoying the music)
Since there ware major other problems i reinstalled winxp and now I get faltering sounds all over the place also when NOT playing kernels streaming but f.e. simply mp3 through mediaplayer. These sounds get worse when starting an application to the point of the sound becoming one large faltering slur.
I don't per se want the pc doing anything else than play music but some disk activity will always occur and when it does it doesn't sound very high end.

I tried playing with latency in the prodigy configuration screen and with PCI latency tool.
config : celeron 2.8 on asus p4rd1 intgerated graphics, sound and lan, uli raid/sata
win xp sp2
one ata and one s-ata disk (doesn't matter from which disk I play)
disk been only filled with music, almost no fragmentation

 

[bitpoh]

Try installing the card in a different PCI slot, turning off all the onboard devices you are not using (e.g. Serial or Parallel ports, sound, RAID, etc.), and maybe also different version of Prodigy driver and see if that helps.

Some people have reported success also with Kernel Streaming using VIA driver on unmodded AV710.

Edit: On a second thought, it sounds like your system is probably running at 100% CPU load for some reason, which would explain why the sound is affected whenever you launch an application or when there are hard disk activities. Make sure that UDMA is turned on for your hard drive and CD/DVD-Rom drive, and that there are no nasty spywares or ad-wares running in the background sucking up CPU cycles.

 

[sgrossklass]

Sounds like the card shares a PCI interrupt with some other commonly used device and uses an old driver (2.18 is current for the Prodigy 7.1). My "AureDigy" didn't like USB activity too much when I still had 2.012 (shares an interrupt with USB host), that was much improved with 2.18.

 

[fjf]

Disable upsampling. Go with 44.1 KHz and 16 bit playback (the native CD resolution, anyway). That lowers CPU usage and avoids pops and cracks. The sound won't suffer.

 

[sgrossklass]

It didn't sound like he's using upsampling at all, but if the resampler should be in the DSP chain, I'd also advise on throwing it out.

 

[fjf]

Most people upsample to 96 or 192 KHz; doing that with a celeron is asking for trouble!

 

[sgrossklass]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fjf Most people upsample to 96 or 192 KHz; doing that with a celeron is asking for trouble!

He probably has a Prescott core based 256K L2 / FSB533 P4 Celeron though - not the fastest CPU on the planet, but certainly much better suited for this task than my PIII-500Es.

Some of these newfangled PCIe mo/bos do have a somewhat weird interrupt routing, but the Asus i915 boards weren't among them IIRC.

 

[bitpoh]

LOL, we keep talking but the original poster seems to have disappeared.