Journal #7367

My newest acquisition? Asus Xonar DS 7.1
The problem? I almost regret buying it, I think I have wasted 60$ for nothing. I am quite desperate with the problems it presents. I am just going to copy paste what I posted on the Asus support forums.

[EDIT]{ I resolved the major problems.

-flashplayer doesn't crash anymore
-I now have FrontPanel access, yay! The front panel has a pre-amp, and the headset sounds a lot better. The best part is that I don't have to plug and unplug anymore, I can just switch between 5.1 and FrontPanel from the Asus panel. That's a massive plus.

Minor problems still left:

-I must activate FlexBass when I switch to 5.1 to be able to get low frequencies, I mean BASS. Without that option activated there is no trace of subwoofer activity...
-I must accomodate myself with the Asus panel, in the windows sound options I'm only controlling a "Master" volume from now on
-I have to do a ton of fine tuning to make the 5.1 system sound how I want. That's not necessarily a problem.
-sometimes windows won't boot the first time, I have to restart and select "Start Windows Normally"....
}

[/EDIT

Let me start by saying that I own Gigabyte GA-P965-S3 motherboard, the only hardware part that has been left without upgrade through the years. The onboard audio broke, and it's not chip-related but mostly connector related. They probably worn out after so much plugging and unplugging.

I decided to buy a PCI audio card, and I thought I should invest a bit more money since I'm doing this anyway, to obtain more sound fidelity.
After some research, I finally stumbled upon the Xonar DS 7.1 and thought this was the choice.

When it arrived, I was prepared for some misc failures, like a boot failuter or something. And indeed the computer failed to boot the first time, don't know what was that all about :).

Anyway, I proceeded to install the audio card. Downloaded the latest driver from the ASUS site for Win7 x64 because it's not provided on the CD. At that moment I was wearing my Plantronics Gamecom headset( modest, but I can't afford expensive things really). I noticed the improvement in sound quality. But I was to be soon disappointed. I wanted to check a song on youtube, and the flashplayer crashes. Firefox, Chrome.. doesn't matter. I tried on Vimeo: the same thing.
Soon I discovered that not even the 5.1 system works. The LF were nonexistent. Even though it was set to 5.1 in the windows playback devices panel, somehow every sound got mixed in the front channel.

Now to ensure that there will be no conflict with the 2 audio cards ( Asus and the onboard Realtek one), I completed these steps:

-I disabled the onboard audio in BIOS
-I uninstalled the Realtek drivers
-I uninstalled the Asus drivers
-I deleted every track of sound drivers with drivers sweeper and then run a registry cleaner(ASC)
-after rebooting, I reinstalled the Asus drivers
-rebooted

The results are the same. Fortunately playing games doesn't provoke a BSOD( well, I only tried a League of Legends match).

Ok here are my main 2 problems, for those of you with TL;DR

1. I can't watch flash videos(Youtube, for ex.) since I installed the Asus Xonar DS. YES I AM SURE it is ITS fault, because right before installing it I watched some videos.

2. Going to "Playback Devices", "Asus Xonar Audio Device" and clicking properties I see no Jack I/O information. Similarly, there are no level controls for each of the channel. The onboard sound card didn't have this problem.

Yes I have the Xonar DS Audio Center, but it is useless if windows doesn't itself recognize the audio features. Because of this there all kinds of problems spawning, like the desired sound functionality is next to impossible to achieve.

I have heard that it might be the driver itself responsible, and there are modded drivers that should work but I'm afraid of doing something wrong.

Can somebody please help me?