Sound Blaster Omni - Stuttering and Popping

[stuppy_]

Hi,

 

I got myself a nice pair of headphones last week (Sennheiser HD598).  Of the 6 ports on my Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard, only the black and orange can output audio.  After testing in Windows, it appears that only the green port is amplified, and as I wanted to make sure I was getting the best sound as possible (without having to spend shed loads of money), I decided to buy an external sound card which has an amplified headphone port. 

 

I opted to buy the Creative Sound Blaster Omni.  It was inexpensive, and offered pretty much what I was looking for.  

 

Before I continue with the Sound Blaster side of things, I should give more detail about my USB setup. 

 

The built-in USB ports on the board comprise of 2 USB 2.0 (red) and 4 USB 3.0 (blue) ports.  I have USB 3.0 external hard drives, and can confirm that the ports do function properly as USB 3.0 ports, with file transfer speeds of around 100MB/sec.

 

From what I can gather, the USB 2.0 ports and two of the USB 3.0 ports go through a VIA chipset hub, and the other two USB 3.0 ports go through the Intel chipset. 

 

When I connect the Sound Blaster to any of the USB ports that go through the VIA chipset, whenever a sound finishes playing, there is a slight pop. For example, an OSX system sound (e-mail notification sound for example) finishes playing, then there is a pop, click or whatever you want to call it.  

 

When I connect the Sound Blaster to one of the USB ports that goes through the Intel chipset, this popping sound disappears.

 

Now onto the drivers/kexts

 

Creative's Sound Blaster Drivers/kext's

So I downloaded the latest drivers from the Creative website which includes the Sound Blaster control panel.  This control panel allows you to use the 5.1 surround sound options and you can also alter things likes surround sound, bass boost and options to 'crystalise' the microphone (supposedly to make it sound clearer). 

 

When you install the files from Creative, it installs 2 kext files into /Library/Extensions/. 

 

• SBUSBAudioDriver.kext
• TruStudioPCUSBAudioPlugin.kext

As soon as these files are installed, everything starts going {censored} up.  Sound becomes easily distorted and when you try and play two sound streams at the same time, there is a lot of stuttering.  

 

Also, when changing the system volume, the little noise indicators you get in OS X (the little plip sounds) are stuttery and distorted.  

 

If you remove them two kexts, everything returns to normal.  The only downside to not using them kexts is that the Sound Blaster control panel doesn't work.  Luckily I believe I can do without the control panel; I do not use the 5.1 surround sound option, and the only thing that I did like was the 'bass enhancement' option, but I am guessing I could replicate that to a degree using a different 3rd party system wide equalizer. 

 

 

I think I have just about covered everything there.  Does anyone have any advice on why I am having issues with the Sound Blaster drivers?  I tried the software on my Macbook Pro and it seemed to be fine on there. 

 

My first thought was that there is an IRQ conflict that is causing the stuttering and popping; but I do not know enough about this kind of thing to even attempt to diagnose.

 

I do have DSDT file patched with pjalms UD5H patches; I have tried using and not using that and it resulted in the same problem.

 

I also thought maybe my cloverALC patch may have been conflicting, but I removed that too and there was no change.

 

 

I have attached some files for anyone who has time to have a look.  

Included is a zip file with my Clover bootlog.log.txt, Clover config.plist, DSDT and SSDT.  Also attached are 4 screen shots of the 4 USB root device trees.

 

Please note: at the time these files were generated, I did not have the DSDT file loaded. 

Many thanks for reading and to anyone who can advise, it will be greatly appreciated. 

dsdt_ssdt_configplist_bootlog.zip