PC Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

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Hack 15 Configure Sound Cards

Make your sound card sing amidst the variations of limited PC resources by finding and using alternative settings.

Sound cards were among the first optional devices to be added to the old ISA PCs. When Windows 3.x became available, and with gamers demanding a more immersive experience, demand rose for a richer audio environment than the mere beeps and boops offered by the PC speaker. Users needed sound to complete "the experience." Companies like Creative Labs and MediaVision thrust sound from PCs into users' ears.

To accomplish this meant borrowing from emerging technologies, creating a few new technologies, and stuffing all of this into what there was of a 16- and then 32-bit PC computing platform.

The default settings for PC sound cards became address 220, IRQ5, and DMA channel 1. While there was seldom a conflict with I/O addressing, sound cards could be reconfigured to use an IRQ other than 5 and a DMA channel other than 1 to avoid other devices that could be present in the system. The DMA channel was needed to avoid stutter and skipping of data streams.

The most common symptom of a misconfigured sound card is a stuttering or choppy effect to otherwise smoothly streaming sounds. If Plug and Play is not solving a conflict and the sound card supports alternative configurations, try changing the IRQ to 7, 10, 11, or 15, or the DMA channel to 3 or 5.

You can determine the settings of your present sound card configuration using Windows Device Manager [Hack #12] or a program like SiSoft Sandra, which will detect and report on all of the I/O devices present.

Be aware that a sound cards needs consistent, exclusive access to IRQ and DMA resources, so these resources cannot be shared with other devices. If you have an ISA-based sound card, look for the jumpers on the card, as in Figure 2-8, or use the configuration software provided to set the card for the generally accepted address (220), IRQ (5), and DMA channel (3 or 5). If you are using an ISA sound card and cannot configure it with nonconflicting settings, upgrade to a PCI-based card to avoid any ISA resource conflicts and gain better sound card performance and fidelity in the process.

Figure 2-8. Jumpers to configure sound card address, DMA and IRQ settings

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