darkpark

If you happen the own Ahead's Nero Burn Ultra might I suggest using NeroMix. It certainly doesn't rival CDex or EAC functionality but Nero's AAC encoder is excellent and AAC/MP4 seems to be the wave of the future in the audio compression arena. If you don't give a $hit about AAC/MP4 and just want MP3 than either CDEX or EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and use the LAME mp3 encoder. I know that the lame encoder is packaged with CDEX, but I don't remember if it also comes with EAC.

have you asked your friends to ping you yet? if so, do they get a response? also, can you do a "ipconfig /all" and paste that into your next message?

dblue, Do you play a single character or a party? Also, how is the action in the game? Do you control the fighting of the character is does it fight on its own? I don't have an Xbox, but I am thinking about buying it for the PC. thanks for any info you can give.

might i suggest a matrox parhelia? it's certainly not a competitor to anything ATI or Nvidia has, but it's visual quality (2d and 3d) is the best. it's good enough for any 3d first person shooter (especially with your 3gig monster of a cpu ) and it's 2d visual quality is terrific. As for a TV-tuner card, get whichever one has all the features you want from hauppauge since they seem to make the best tv tuner cards. check this site out... http://www.hauppauge.com/html/products.htm#pci additionally, once you get your tv tuner card download Dscaler which is a better tv tuner program than the one that is bundled with the above tv tuner cards.

Hmm... I've always been partial to Abit boards. The first mobo I ever bought was a Gigabyte and it was very stable, but lacked some features and its performance was average. The Abit boards, on the other hand, were always feature packed and had decent performance. Unless experience proves me wrong, I'll stick with Abit. Thank you very much! My current board is the Abit KX7-333 (non-raid version) being humped by an AMD Athlon XP 2100+

may I also suggest that you place a dish of anti-freeze in the vicinity of your speakers. *evil snicker*

that would depend how you're connecting your audigy2 to this reciever. is it a regular hi-fi reciever or a dolby digital decoder? i think that if you're using your analog connections that perhaps you might not lose the eax2 effects. And NO, prologic II is not better than eax2 for games. remember that there's some positioning audio cues within eax which prologic II will definately not do.

Both of you make valid points but InnovaZero's points are not worth the extra $$$. That's just me, of course. I'm a little bit more conservative with my hard earned money.

which modes are you referring to? are you talking about the different EAX settings in the EAX control panel? if you scan through each category at the top of each list will have a blank setting or something. i don't remember the exact name.

I agree, i would not bother with the decoder. the only time the docoder is useful is when you play dvd's. beyond that, the speakers are terrific! now if your nick says anything about your taste in music then you'll definately be pleased! pop in some Tool and turn it up!!!!!

I personally wouldn't trust the windows's speaker configuration. Sheesh, why don't you rerun the setup (see below) for the audigy and at least install the surround mixer. i believe in the surround mixer you can configure your speakers. setup: pop in your audigy cd and go to \Audio\English\Setup and run the setup program there. i think you'll get the option to select what you wish to install. i'm not completely sure since it's been a while since i've had the audigy. anyway, after you install the surround mixer and configure your speakers try powerdvd one more time. ps: also install the AudioHQ program too. there are some options in it that have a bearing on dvd playback.

you've got two places where you configure the speaker setup for the audigy. one in the audio settings for Windows XP and the seperate program that comes with the Audigy. I don't remember the exact name of it. make sure that they both match. also, what version of powerdvd are you using and what options do you have available (not greyed out) to you in the audio setup of powerdvd? by the way, spdif is for digital output. it's fancy acronym for Sony Phillips Digital InterFace.

sigh... if only 3dfx were still around. we'd have even more fun! well, the only other possible competitor could be Matrox but they don't intend to compete in the gaming market.

i'm somewhat ignorant when it comes to wiring and electronics, but seeing as that changing the configuration on your computer reduced the crackling a little i would guess that it's a software problem. do you have a portable cdplayer with a 1/8 jack on it? connect your front speaker cable to it and play some music. do you still get crackling?

do you actually have the PM 4.1 or the V2-400? i was also experiencing some crackling with my PM's and it was because of the faulty preamp (the control pod). you can by the new control pod from klipsch which is my nicer than the original one.

i haven't seen any digital decoders for under $100. the cheapest one i've seen is the AD 4000 by midiland. it's $129. why don't you check Ebay.

my guess would be that perhaps one of the two drivers is loose or torn.

it sounds like he's got a speaker mismatch somewhere no? if he's got one of the audigy's then perhaps the speakers aren't configured correctly in the audiohq panel. that's just a guess, though.

I don't mean to insult, but gamers don't have brand loyalty. Of course, I don't blame them. After all, they are after the latest and greatest. Anyway, the lead that nvidia had with their tnt's and the geforce cards is MUCH longer than ati has had the lead with the 9700 and on cards. come on, i don't think nvidia is going to be sitting by idley sooner or later they'll release a videocard that will wipe the floor with ati's. i hope they do! i also hope that ati releases another card then to beat nvidia. i want competition so these absurd high costs of video cards go down.

what are the technical specs of the headphone jack? how much power does it put out? is it good enough to drive a set of Sennheiser HD590 headphones (they have an impendance of 120 ohms)?

yeah! videocard. that's what i said pinipig.

have you tried flashing the bios yet? check the mfg's website for new firmware for your motherboard. i've had similar issues with Windows Me. My system would either reboot or shutdown on software/game installs that took a lot (ie: copied lots of files). Anyway, i moved upto Windows XP and haven't had any problems since. Mind you, I use NTFS but only on the partition where XP is installed. You don't have to use NTFS if you don't want it. There are advantages to it, though. It doesn't fragment as badly as FAT16/32 and is less likely to become corrupted when your computer is shutdown incorrectly. There are more advantages, i'm sure but those are the main ones i think. although, the disadvantage is that it's more difficult to recover Windows if you have NTFS. Meaning that you can't simply create a DOS bootdisk and run scandisk on the partition/drive to fix your problems. My advice to you, if you upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP, is to create a parition about 8 Gigabytes and install windows onto that. put your games, mp3's, etc...(not applications) on the 2nd/remaining partition.

i could be wrong. *grin* i probably am. i know that dvd-audio discs have also on them DTS and Dolby tracks. yeah, i F'd up here. i'm sorry. check this link out for some good info on dvd-audio: http://www.digitalaudioguide.com/faq/dvd-audio/faq_2.htm#What%20are%20the%20DVD-Audio%20Specifications?

it's nice to see someone finally give nvidia a run for their money. i'm sure nvidia will come back with some temporarily superiour video card and naturally ati will follow suite. isn't competition nice? as long as the two keep trying to outdo each other, we (consumers) have only to gain some new and wonderful soundcards.

Can you please post the following information: sound card model and OS. it's possible that your soundcard is having issues playing audio at 22khz since the multiplayer side of RTCW is locked at this sampling rate. go into the single player side and see if youc an set the audio at this rate to see if my guess holds true. some other things to try is see if a patch is available for the game and also if newer drivers exists for you soundcard. oh yeah, Microsoft has also released a new version of DirectX9.0a which you might also wish to try if the two other things don't resolve your problem.