Sound Problem

[Yoshimitsu]

Hi,
I wasn't using the on-board sound chip since I had fitted a Creative AWE64 sound card which worked fine. But today I decided to get the on-board sound card to work and see what it was like.

I first removed the sound card which I had attached,

I changed the jumper settings on the motherboard to ENABLE the on-board sound chip,

I connected the sound cable from the cdrom to the motherboard,

I connected the speakers to the motherboard socket and then

I installed the driver which came with the motherboard cd (that didn't help so I downloaded a driver from driverguide.com but it didn't help either)

The onboard sound chip is a CREATIVE ES1373 PCI sound chip and I am running Windows 2000 Professional

After doing all this there is no sound at all. I checked the Sounds and Multimedia which is in the Settings and chose the right driver but still it did not work.

Could you please help me correct this problem?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Yoshi

[Rick]

I see you Didn’t remove / uninstall the AWE32 drivers and or other SB sound programs.
If haven’t then that would be the first place to look.
The awe32 drivers and programs are not compatible with the pci card

Also double check the Bios for enable on board sound.
You should also have a setting in bios for enabling dos support in the chip

[Yoshimitsu]

Hi Rick,
thanks alot for you reply. I did remove the other drivers first and i'm sorry I didn't mention that before in my earlier post. Anyway I found out that the driver was working fine but the sound was so low even though the volume was set to high. I think it is the speakers. My speakers are not stereo speakers and by stereo I mean they don't have any BASS or TREBLE knobs on the speakers, i'm sure you know what I mean. The speakers too are made by Creative but it is an old model.

Do you think that the on-board sound card only works with stereo speakers and not with the speakers I have??

Also I dunno what to change in the BIOS settings. I did take a look at the integrated peripherals but I didn't know what to change. It didn't say specifically "Enable On-Board sound". So I am not too sure what to change. I don't want to change the wrong thing.

Anyway at this link
(http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:pUVQoZuwAtQC:www.pcpartner.com.hk/man/via/c93100bv.pdf+motherboard+35C93100XX&hl=en&ie=UTF-8)

you will find a complete description of my motherboard. This is the same book I refer to understand my motherboard.

Please reply.

Kind Regards,

Yoshi

[Jhorner1]

If you are hearing sound, however soft, then your sound is working, but you may need amplified speakers (the kind that plug into a power outlet). Hope that helps.

[Sylvander]

Hello Yoshimitsu

If there are two speakers then they'll almost certainly be stereo.
If you have a volume control then it will have a built in [stereo] amplifier. If there's no volume control then it probably doesn't have an amplifier.
The lack of tone controls [alone] is of no great significance and has no bearing upon whether the system is stereo or not. It just saves on cost.
For a sound system to be stereo it must have two channels which are totally separate at all points from the sound source [the voice or instrument] right through to the sound production at the speakers.

If the Creative sound-card had buit-in amplification and your speakers have no amplifier but you were connecting them to a stereo headphone/speaker socket with its own volume control they would sound loud enough.

If your on-board sound-card has no built-in amplifier and only supplies "line outputs" [very low power signals] then your [unamplified] speakers would never be able to sound loud enough unless you acquired a separate [stereo] amplifier to put between the line output socket and the speakers.