When I was working at EA, we moved offices and my boss had a boxed, never used sound card. It had all sorts of extra bits and a remote and loads of mysterious, audio cables. I looked it up on the net and it was only a year or two old - and not high end but better than I would ever bother buying, so I took it home.
To be clear it’s an Audigy2 ZS.
The problem first occurred when I went to make a cup of tea leaving my door open, whilst some harmonious music was playing in winamp. A few minutes later and my flatmate has run into the kitchen clearly distressed explaining “Your computer is screaming and I’m worried it’s going to blow up”. True enough, the poor wee Compaq was having some kind of fit and had hung. I power cycled and the problem went.
Some weeks later and watching a video in VLC, I am 3 minutes in and the audio starts to pop and squeal and it happens again. I reboot, scrub to the same part of the episode and it happens exactly as before.
Then, on a more serious note, I am playing EVE online, a game you never want to hang on you when you are in the middle of an epic space battle (as you will effectively be leaving your expensive ship unpiloted and being destroyed) and the audio begins to stutter again, and hangs. Later again, in winamp, eeeeee..! sqsqsqeeeee..! machine seizes another reboot. So a quick google search for “squeal” and “audigy” finds me the known issue, the legendary “Squeal of death” or SOD.
Creative haven’t apparently ever managed to isolate or create a bug fix for this although users have been busy bees suggesting workaround such as
PCI latency tweaks
3 different Audigy drivers
Changed around IRQs
Different PCI slots
Online and offline
Hardware/software mode
EAX on/off
CMSS on/off
Reduced speaker volumes
Forum posts vary from the ancient to the recent, with users strangely frenzied to come up with the ultimate fix.
Beats me so I’m back on my onboard sound card. If anyone ever conclusively solves the problem, let me know, but the point is Don’t buy Creative Audigy 2!