someone please help!! sound problem!!

[johnnyv308]

ok I'll set this off by letting you all know that I have searched these forums for a sound problem that matches mine but I can not find one!

My sound for Half Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source is very distorted. It has an echo kind of effect and it is imposible to make out what is being said/heard in game. I have searched online for solutions to this problem and have downloaded drivers and whatnot but I can't seem to get rid of this problem. At one point I had three of my 4 speakers all working fine except for the front left one(my sound system is sound blaster live and it works fine, I have run sound test on them and everything is fine with them- HL2 is the only program that causes a problem). When I plug in headphones I can hear the left before the right and the left is distorted while the right side is fine.


I would really appreciate a response on this- I have not been able to enjoy HL2 at all and I bought it over 3 weeks ago!!



my system... just in case there maybe a problem I don't know about

dell dimension 4600 PC
-2.8 ghz Pentium 4
- 1.5 gig pc 3200 ram
- sound blaster live 5.1 sound
- Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 128 mb graphics card

ps. there are no graphics problems, game runs fine hl2 runs very fast and smooth.

 

[^Ben]

What have you set the sound options to ingame?

Headphones?
5.1 etc etc.

 

[Chris D]

Is it only with Source engine games or does it happen in original CS and HL too? Does it happen in any other games?

First thing I thought is that it might be a problem with your sound card or something.

Other than that, if you have Windows XP, rip out all of the sound devices from device manager and do a fresh install of the drivers, if you haven't done so already.

 

[beam]

ya dude I get the same problem once in a while.....just go into sound options and mess around with your speaker settings til it sounds good. I have mine on 4 speakers but in my control panel I have it set to 2 speakers. If I set to 2 speakers in-game it will distort the sound :x

 

[johnnyv308]

I have set the sound options to both 5.1 and 4 speakers and run the sound tests on both and nothing changes. I have played around with graphics(lowered resolution, changed details and shadows and all that to lower settings). I have also put sound on low quality and sound on high quality. Tried as many different setups as I could and there is no change.

 

[johnnyv308]

Is it only with Source engine games or does it happen in original CS and HL too? Does it happen in any other games?

First thing I thought is that it might be a problem with your sound card or something.

Other than that, if you have Windows XP, rip out all of the sound devices from device manager and do a fresh install of the drivers, if you haven't done so already.

This problem is only with Source engine games. Every other game/sound on my computer work fine.

I have reinstaled my sound card drivers and run the diagnostics test and there is no problem there.

I really don't know why this is happening, could it be graphics card related b/c I have read online and on forums that the graphics card may have some kind of effect on messed up sound? But then again my in game graphics are great and they run very smoothly at the highest resolution so I don't see how there would be a problem there.