Another HT Omega Striker 7.1 Problem

After building my current system and getting frustrated that Realtek wasn't producing any passable sound for my 5.1 speakers, I decided to pick up a soundcard and found the Striker 7.1 from HT Omega had great reviews.

I installed the W7 drivers from their site and had beautiful sound for about a minute before it started deteriorating and I was listening to something from my music that sounded like the devil singing underwater. I replugged the jacks in and got not change, so I started searching around and found some solutions on this site. Merging the W7 and vista drivers (-HsMgr.exe) worked okay, but I had some pops and static in the sound. Installing just the vista drivers worked pretty well for awhile wither fewer pops and static, but the sound again deteriorated after about 15 minutes.

Now I am at a loss. Is this a driver, software, or hardware problem? All I can currently think of is that I'm using a RC of Windows 7 professional 64bit that was out just before the official release, and perhaps I should reformat with whats currently on the shelves. I'd much rather find out I should try that than return the card or find out my pci slot is faulty.

That HsMgr.exe has been causing problems with Win 7 sound drivers since day one. It was a problem with Asus Xonar drivers also but there is a way to disable that file in system configuration. There are actually two of those files, one for 64 bit and the other for 32bit. You need to disable one or the other depending on your Op system.

Just type into command prompt "system configuration" then hit enter. Once open go to the "startup" tab then scroll down to the HsMgr files, there should be two of them.

Disable the first one by unchecking it then restart to save the setting. If the first one doesn't fix the problem open "system configuration" and then recheck the first one and go to the second one and uncheck it then restart. Disabling one or the other will usually fix your audio problems.

Thank you for the reply, but that did not seem to solve my problem. From what I've researched, HsMgr causes problems in the running of applications, but I have yet to find any problems or comments on the actual sound quality. No matter which drivers I install, vista x64 of w7 x64, my sound is either immediately full of quips and static, or slowly becomes such with constant output, like playing music. I am not sure why this is, I've reinstalled the drivers probably 20 times today and not gotten any positive results.

Unless there is a solution I don't know about, I believe I'm going to reformat with the retail version of W7 Ultimate x64 and hope there is something in there that fixes something this RC build is doing wrong.

Go into bios and see about the setting PCI Delay Transaction.

Set it to enabled if it's currently disabled and vice-versa. If testing both ways fail, set it to enabled and leave it.

You could check motherboard manufacturer for bios update which can only help. Update chipset drivers too.

Hikarius said:

Thank you for the reply, but that did not seem to solve my problem. From what I've researched, HsMgr causes problems in the running of applications, but I have yet to find any problems or comments on the actual sound quality. No matter which drivers I install, vista x64 of w7 x64, my sound is either immediately full of quips and static, or slowly becomes such with constant output, like playing music. I am not sure why this is, I've reinstalled the drivers probably 20 times today and not gotten any positive results.

Unless there is a solution I don't know about, I believe I'm going to reformat with the retail version of W7 Ultimate x64 and hope there is something in there that fixes something this RC build is doing wrong.

The Omega drivers weren't made for the RC which is probably why they won't work. I missed that on my first read. There were some major changes between the RC and the RTM as far as sound goes. The newer RTM drivers don't seem to work on the older RC builds so updating to the RTM might be a good idea.

I think I'm running into the same or very similar issue. I'm running Windows 7 Profession x64 with the same sound card. I have downloaded the most recent driver from the manufacturers website.

I'm about half way through trying all of the suggestions at this time. However, my issue is as follows. I will start my computer and the sound works fine in all applications. I will open up Ventrilo and login and chat with some people. At the same time, I may be checking out things such as youtube or playing a video game. Then at some point, I haven't been able to determine the exact cause, or time, sound will stop working in firefox, video games, and I will become unable to play any MP3's.

However, while this happens, I'm still able to hear the sound in Ventrilo and talk back, the only thing which seems to be affected in Ventrilo when this happens is that I can't hear the initial 'beep' when I click my push to talk button.

I'll let you know the outcome of my further testing.


Update: After some more testing, it looks like the issue may be ventrilo. I found that after closing it sound appeared to start working this time. Now to see what might be the issue with that.

torrentg, I could not find that option in my BIOS. My motherboard specifically is this one: Newegg.com - EVGA 141-BL-E757-TR LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX X58 SLI LE Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards and there is a BIOS update mentioning PCI-E loads which could help. I think I will go ahead and reformat with the retail version of W7 Ultimate 64bit and then update the BIOS for the sake of covering everything at once.

Thank you all for the replies, I will post back here once I've reformatted.

Hikarius said:

there is a BIOS update mentioning PCI-E loads which could help.

Well isn't that card a PCI model? If so, I don't think it would help much. PCI and PCI-e are very different.

Nevertheless, bios update always recommended even if no problems at all. Prevent future problems, heh.

You are certainly right, PCI-e is much different.
Regardless, reformat complete to retail version of W7 Ultimate 64bit, BIOS updated, ht omega W7 drivers loaded, and so far everything is crystal clear with no problems whatsoever.

Thank you all very much for your help.