Vista - Soundblaster EAX and 5.1 support available for X-Fi and Audigy cards

I don't know how widespread the knowledge about this is (I just found out by
accident) but if you have a soundblaster X-Fi or Audigy card, you can now
re-enable EAX and full 3d (5.1 and 7.1) support via a new product called
"Creative Alchemy".

For X-Fi owners its a free download, for Audigy owners it costs $10

I was replaying F.E.A.R. Extraction Point and noticed the EAX audio options
were greyed out and I was only getting stereo sound. After installing
Alchemy I am getting EAX effects and 3d sound but its not perfect. The music
volume seems to be at maximum no matter what the setting is in the menu and
I occasionally cannot hear the conversations from my teammates. But wow,
what a difference! I had forgotton how immersive hearing sounds behind me
was.

To be fair, FEARXP is not one of the officially supported games for Alchemy
and I have not tried any on their list yet.

If you have the right hardware you might consider Alchemy. Since they have
released it as a separate product, I doubt it will ever be built-in to the
Vista drivers.

Mark

I received the barebones today, and have the new PC up and running. Thanks
for posting. I will download this file, and see if it fixes the bottom 3
grayed out sound options in FEAR. BTW Mark, I beat the first game, and
started Extraction Point. I will have to start over again after I get all
the drivers installed in new gaming rig.

Ken

New Rig
Mid Tower 680w Power supply
Intel Quad Q6600
Asus P5N-E SLI
2mb 667 Ram
XFX 7950 GTextreme


"Mark" <mark_butler@xxxxxx> wrote in message
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