I figured all the clever people are here so..

[Fletch]

Ive been having audio issues in some games, most notiably in splinter cell:CT, where a sound that is supposed to accompany a certain action wont play until around 3-4 seconds afterwards.

I've reinstalled and updated everything on my PC. Mobo (NF7-s) drviers, graphics (6800gt) and soundcard (sblive 5.1) drivers, directX, windows updates etc etc. All to no avail.

I recently went through XPTC, and was wondering if anything in there might have had an adverse effect.

 

[Link]

My first guess is that it is taking this time to load the sound from the hard drive. Is it only the first time the action is performed by any chance?
Is it just one specific thing, or several things?
How much RAM do you have?
Any other games do this?

 

[Fletch]

System specs are

AMD 3000+
1 GIG of ram
6800GT

For anyone who's played the game, an example of the problem is in the first level where you hear the gunshots in the distance for the first time, the trickling water sound nearby has to stop playing for the gunshot sounds to play, and then the water sound resums polaying afterwards.

I've been tinkering for a while with the configuration files, increasing the sound chache, reducing the sound quality etc, but they dont seem to want to play together.

Same results from using the onboard nvidia soundstorm on my mobo. I've been waiting patiently for the new Xfi's to come out before upgrading my soundcard, but regardless, it should be running fine.

 

[Asus]

Do you have EAX enabled or disabled? What's the quality set to (bits)? You shouldn't need to mess with the sound cache. It might help a little but it wouldn't be the source of the problem.

 

[Fletch]

Apparently SCCT detects whether you have EAX, and utilises it where available. If theres a command to turn it off id happily live without it

Edit: got it working. Disabling CTHELPER sorted it out, which is good since the sound is amazing in this game.