Praying to the audio gods
Last year, I bought a $99 M-Audio Revolution 7.1 audio card for my Mac. It's essentially the main (only?) working consumer-level audio card for OSX. Unfortunately, when I last used it, the drivers had a bad habit of causing kernel panics once in a while and it had a tendency to blast out static in certain situations, so I eventually yanked it.
Fast forward to today. I downloaded the latest driver (1.2.9 from last December) and have re-enabled the card. I'm still getting the random static blasts, but so far after a whopping 15 minutes, no kernel panics.
So here's my public prayer to the OSX audio gods - please let these drivers be stable for me. :-)
Comments
I've been fortunate. I haven't had any Kernel Panics caused by my Revo 7.1. I also don't get nearly as much static now that I moved to speakers that use the digital outs. The Circle Surround seemed to be the cause of most static.
Posted by: a2daj | February 25, 2004 05:19 PM
Has this persisted?
I'm using a Roland UA-30 USB audio box, and unfortunately the sound quality is rather poor at higher volumes, presumably due to drivers.
Posted by: Richard Bannister | March 1, 2004 01:32 AM
Hard to say, Richard. I have had two suspicious incidents since I reinstalled the drivers. For the first, my Mac spontaneously rebooted itself while I was away from it. For the second, my Mac locked up hard while playing MOHAA: Spearhead. Neither left an entry in panic.log though, so they may just be coincidental.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | March 1, 2004 02:50 PM
Hmm. I don't need 7.1 by any means; my audio setup is stereo only. I wonder if waiting until I upgrade to G5 would be the best solution.
Posted by: Richard Bannister | March 10, 2004 03:15 AM
The OSX audio gods now have supplied us with an 'official' Apple backed OpenAL implementation. Let us pray some more for some true multichannel audio in Mac games soon ;) Then these Revos can really be put to good use! BTW, any issues yet, Brad?
Posted by: a2daj | March 27, 2004 03:57 PM