Hey all, I recently purchased an E-MU 1616m PCI sound card and so far it's been great. I'm running my headphones through it and everything is working a treat. Now, what I would like to do is use the in-built mic on my monitor through the on-board audio. Fair enough, I enable on-board audio, install the SoundMAX drivers for it, reboot and plug everything in. The mic was working fine the first time, but as soon as I reboot or turn off the computer again, when I try to use the mic all I get is distortion. I've double checked my sound settings are correct in Control Panel: Under "Audio" Sound Playback is through the E-MU and Sound Recording is through SoundMAX, and under "Voice" Voice Playback is through the E-MU and Voice Recording is through SoundMAX. I've checked every Volume control and all settings are turned up full (no mutes are enabled either). Both the SoundMAX and Creative drivers are the most recent ones. It seems as though there might be some conflict between the audio drivers, but I'm not 100% sure. So my question is does anyone have any experience using both on-board audio and a sound card in a PCI slot? And if so, did they get along or did you have problems? I've been reading through manuals and checking many, many different settings but I'm still not having any luck. Are there any diagnostic tools I could use to check the signal to see if it's being interfered with or something like that? Hopefully someone can help! I've been wracking my brains the last couple of days and its looking as though I won't be able to run them side-by-side.

Windows XP is not build to share sound sources. It is possible to have them installed next to eachother without conflicts, but to use them together is another story.

My advise to check where the problem is:

Record the sound with your onboard sound card with the emu card taken out of the PCI slot (don't de-install the drivers, as soon as you plug it in again, it will work) and check with playing it on your onboard card to see if there is any distortion. If not, then you know that the problem is that they share in and outputs. If the problem still is there, then check the sound with the emu card and disable the onboard card in the device panel (don't forget to set the outputs correct for both options).

If the problem still is there I would suggest to de-install the emu card, record again and check again with your onboard sound. If there is still a problem, then there is something wrong with your onboard card/input.
If there is no problem at this stage, then de-install the onboard card, re-install the emu card and check the sound now on the emu card. If everything is correct there should be no distortion in this one either.

I hope this helps a bit.

Good luck!

I think that if the onboard card is able to record audio there should be no problem qith the drivers of the 2 cards. If you get distorted sound it should be because you have to turn down the mic fader in the recording section of the windows's mixer.

goto Start->Exec->type "sndvol32" and press ok

Now you should see the system's mixer.

turn on Options->Advanced controls
select Options->Properties, then select "Recording" instead of "Playback" and press ok; if "Recording" is grayed then you should have 2 SoundMAX devices: one for playback and one for recording. Choose the recording one.

Then goto the mic channel.

1) select it as the recording input (it should already be selected)
2) if it has an "advanced" button below, then click it. There should appear a window that has an option box with something like "gain +20db" or something similar. You should deselect it
3) turn down the fader (the slider) of the channel and try recording until it doesn't get distorted.