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HP Workstation Win7 Audio Problems
I have just set up a fairly complex HP XW8200 in Windows 7 and am having audio problems. It is an HP XW8200 with two 3.8ghz processors, two RAID controllers with a total of 13 drives in RAID 1+0 (8 SAS in front mounted backplane, 4 SATA internal), and a 1TB disc attached to the onboard SATA controller. I have used a couple of different video adapters, but the current one is an XFX Radeon 5550.
The problem is that I have sound, except that human voices are inaudible except when turned up extremely loud, and a lot of sounds are clipped, for lack of a better word. I have ran the latency checker, & found no problems. Device manager shows no issues with any device, and am using the driver package installed by the Win7 installer. HP offers a driver package for 64 bit Vista, but when I install it, the sound is much worse, almost inaudible. This machine has the integrated "SoundMax" controller.
I have installed no drivers whatsoever for anything except one PCI-X Raid controller and the current video card (except that installed with Win7), and although I have heard that some drivers may conflict with the onboard sound, I have been reluctant to experiment with drivers outside of the sound issue, because the performance of this machine is not only flawless, but awesome.
I realize I could likely solve this by installing a new soundcard, & may end up having to do so, but this machine is running short on PCI slots due to the two RAID controllers using two slots, and blocking two more. I would prefer to fix the SoundMax problem & reserve my last remaining PCI slot for something else.
Any help is appreciated. Note that I am fairly experienced with PC's in general & am a software developer, so it is probable that I have already covered the basics, although I have been reluctant to do anything drastic since the machine runs so well.
Thanks,
Jameson