Does anybody have a Q10 & Soundblaster working together?

[fieldhouse]

I'm setting up a workstation for a recording project and am trying to get the pieces to work nicely together.

Ok, let me restate that. Everything works fine (and has worked fine) until I installed an Aardvark Q10.

The combination I've come up with is that I simply can't get the Q10 to function properly if I have a SoundBlaster Live! card in the system.

The system I've been beating my head against is:

Dual 550 Mhz Pentium III Xeon Processors (2MB cache)
Intel MS440GX Workstation motherboard
1GB ECC memory
ATI Radeon 7500 AGP video adapter
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live!
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI controller (for boot drive)

Bottom line like the subject says, does anyone have a Q10 working with an SB Live card? Aardvark's support has been kicking this one about for a while and won't come out and say that they're incompatible, but have recommended I pull the SB card from my system.

If it really is incompatible, does anyone have a creative suggestion for an alternative noise producing device? I can't imagine wanting to run my system sounds, etc. through my Q10 and studio monitors.

 

[Phyl]

I tried to get the two to co-exist on my system:

1.7 GHz P4 w/ 1GB RAM
SONAR 2.0 XL
Windows XP

Everything was fine until I installed the Sound Blaster (SB). First off, Sonar complained when i tried to record at 24 bit resolution because the SB only had 16 bit resolution. Then I had problems with audio drop outs when playing back a small project with only three tracks. I uninstalled SB drivers, re-installed different SB drivers, uninstalled Aardvark, Sonar, re-installed, followed all the PC optimization guides I could think of, and in the end the only thing that worked was pulling that stupid SB card out of there.

Some people have suggested that SB is competing for system resources, some have said that installing the SB before the Q10 is the answer.

I gave up and threw money at the problem - I bought an external sound module and MIDI keyboard since all I wanted the SB for in the first place was to play drum sounds and MIDI synth tracks.

There is probably a way to make the Q10 and SB co-exist but looking back I'm glad I upgraded to an external unit. The improvement in sound quality and flexibility it gave me were tremendous.

 

[DougC]

Creative soundcards are famous for not working with other soundcards enabled. That doesn't fix your problem, but it may keep you from wasting any more time.
~
-I have seen it claimed that if you use non-Creative drivers (www.kxproject.com) for the Creative card, it is possible. You gain new soundcard capabilities but lose all the old ones, it seems....

 

[fieldhouse]

Thanks guys for the responses.

For the record, i did have the SoundBlaster installed first, so that doesn't do the trick.

I think I may take the suggestion and use something else for midi.

 

[skiks]

solution??

Hey DougC,

Thanks for the kx Project tip. I have a DP 24/96, Sonar 2XL, AMD Athlon 1600+, Win XP and was having similar problems. I replaced my Creative SB drivers with the kx Project drivers and so far.....things are working much better than before. We'll see.

cheers!

www.kxproject.com