SoundMAX AD1888

[MtK]

Hi,

any Vista 32bit drivers for this on-board?

[Eck]

I have an Asus A7V880 that has that SoundMAX AD1888 chip. I'm not running it right now but used the SoundMAX at times when I did. I enjoyed the Sensaura stuff and even bought the updates from digibuy.com. But they only work in 98SE, 2000, or XP.

In Vista you can update from Device Manager to the automatic Windows Update drivers for it. You know, right click the card in Device Manager, Update Driver, Automatically Search For Driver. That should work fine but if not then you can do it again and choose the manual search and see if the driver is already on the system but Vista hasn't been able to automatically recognize it for some reason. If you see that codec under the Sound And Video Controllers when you have it search then you just choose it and after some possible warning messages Vista should use it.

Others have extracted the XP driver downloaded from the board's website or found on the motherboard install cd and directed Vista during that manual update to the WDM folder that just has the inf and driver files for it. I wouldn't bother doing what some others have done and run Setup as an administrator as all that system tray control panels and Sensaura effects stuff won't work on Vista anyway. Better not to bog down the system with non working software that will try to run all the time. Just use the driver.

Folks have said that the XP driver sounds better than the Vista driver from Microsoft. Either way you'll control the speakers and stuff from Vista's Audio Control. You run Speaker Setup from there (unless you only use the default 2.1) and hopefully Vista will set it up for 5.1 or whatever you have. Your mp3's and other 2 channel sources will only play from your front 2 speakers but DVD's and 5.1's should use all your speakers.

If you get a player like Foobar2000 you can use a plugin to get Stereo X2 so even your mp3's will play from all speakers. Or purchase a WMP plugin from SRS Labs for that, if they've updated to a Vista version.

[MtK]

Vista Update couldn't find any drivers, that's why I'm asking...

In the meantime, I've installed the XP drivers...