Just what sort of speakers do you have? It could be their fault.

The headphone output can sometimes give you very different quality than the speaker outs. Where you cd player was designed with headphones in mind, soundcards like regular stereos can give you subpar performance due to their focus on enhancing main speaker output.

Mystic, I have been using Soundblaster cards for years, and have been very happy with them. Your problem may be related to an incorrect setting. First, go to 'sounds and audio devices' in your control panel. Under the 'speakers' tab, check the dropdown menu, and make sure that you have 'stereo headphones' highlighted. If not, do so, and click 'apply'. If this doesn't do the trick, post back and I will give you some further things to do in the Creative software.

You mean this game has audio?

No, i dunno, i mean propper music, this issue not related to the game.

If this doesn't do the trick, post back and I will give you some further things to do in the Creative software.

I have been through all those settings exaustively, there is nothing more to be done.

well i could try the sounblaster card in my old computer, if it sounds good in there then i will know it is the AMD system that is somehow draining the base out of the card.

One thing though, in my old computer, i can hear the HDD murmur in my speakers. every time the HDD light flashes, i can hear it, and it is a bit annoying, what could cause it?

In the Creative software, under 'speaker settings', there is a tab called 'bass boost'

Unfortunately, even a slight increase in base causes speaker distortion. There are two main causes of speaker distortion - amp too weak, or speakers too weak. Since the speakers work fine on the other system, i must assume the power output of the soundblaster card is simply too weak.

In the Creative Audio Console there is a 'speakers' tab that should be set to headphones. IIRK, it is defaulted to synch with windows, but it wouldn't hurt to check.

Synch with windows? that dousn't sound good, windows operating systems are always on the lookout for ways to screw things up!

i can hear the HDD murmur in my speakers. every time the HDD light flashes, i can hear it, and it is a bit annoying, what could cause it?

Are you sure you don't just have loud hardware? I live alone so I can use nice speakers, but it seems like I've never had a PC box that was anywhere near quiet.

Some of them had very loud hard drives, others loud power supplies, and my current box has what seems to be a vibration issue that I can make go away temporarily by pressing down on a place along the line where the front panel "connects" to the main casing.

If the disk sound is really in your speaker output, this seems like a Q for Mumble even if he doesn't care about PC sound personally. IIRC, he's an electrical engineer.

Hey, I'm no expert with soundcards. I use the Nvidia sound chip in my AMD mobo and it sounds great to me.

Curious though...do you have to disable onboard sound in bios in order to use a soundcard? It's been ages for me since I've set one up.

do you have to disable onboard sound in bios in order to use a soundcard?

You should always disable the onboard sound whenever you add a new sound card. It isn't done in the bios, though. It is done in the 'device manager' in windows.

Hmm. So I have learned something tonight. I haven't owned a proprietary rig in some years; the last one was a Compaq, and I used the device manager to disable. I'm not sure that there was even the option to do it in the bios. The bios in this system was pretty crappy, with few options for change by the user. But like I said, it has been a long while, and my memory may be playing tricks on me.

The bios in this system was pretty crappy, with few options for change by the user.

I have seen some pretty sparse BIOS setups over the years, and Compaq is not known for letting customers get too creative with their machines.

Try an HP with the ASUS A8NLA mobo. From what I learned about it, ASUS built this mobo specifically for HP. No support from either site with regards to BIOS updates, since it is a 'special' mobo of course. Should have been called a mofo as far as I am concerned since the settings options are very, very limited. I am surprised that I was able to at least select between pci and pci-e when I installed my card since it is one of the most bare bones mobo I've read about to date. This is why I am saving for a new mobo. HP, Compaq, Dell, Gateway... whatever... my opinion is they can all take a long walk off of a short pier. And don't even get me started on Circuit City or Best Buy... or even the small independent electronics/PC outlets. None of them know shit when it comes to answering questions and a few of them even went so far as to tell me that I was more informed than they were on a said product. What the hell ever happened to good customer service backed by knowledgeable people (of course Stardock rules... can you say brownie points?) who could actually carry on a conversation without sounding like they're talking out of their ass? Hell, one guy who owns his own PC upgrade/repair shop had no clue when I asked him about a couple of different graphics cards. Then I whipped out the tech specs and he was baffled. This is a guy who is supposed to inform people about their PC's... and I was actually teaching him... now that's scary. Sorry for the rant.

money was very tight, so I had decided to buy a canned system this time instead of building it myself.

Just typed about three paragraphs and when I hit post I get the old cannot find/doesn't exist and then my stuff is gone... hate that!
Anyhoo, trying again, I am in my mid thirties and only got my first computer in 2001. It was a lame little HP Pavilion 7955. My high school was one that only allowed the 'super smart' Einsteinians access to the class however, and in the end it seemed like the state's purchase of a dozen or so Apple IIe's IIRC was more for the handful of teachers who ran the classes than the students. I would always see them in that comp room after school pissing around doing their own thing (yes, I was there due to detention, go figure).
Anyway, my wife had a little windfall of fundage this past summer so we thought we would buy a new computer. If only I'd known then what I know now... things would have gone much differently. I mean, I am always learning about this (even last week I had to ask the super lame question of the meaning behind a 20+4 pin mobo connector)so it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Now however, I think that I know enough to put my own system together and that's what I am working towards ($$$$$=OUCH).
To get back to you Moosetek13, I do know that HP has a BIOS update, but my machine came with the update already installed (v3.11 IIRC) so nothing doing there. I can't complain too much since HP never really did me wrong... they just put some stupid limits as to what you can and can't do. I upgraded from the integrated 6150LE graphics with a GeForce 7600GT and let me just say, even though it isn't a top of the line card, my GC2 games have never looked better! . I also upgraded the psu and went with an OCZ Gamextreme 700 watter. Lots of room to add on down the road. I was going to add more memory but since my mobo only has one pci-e slot and I would like to go to SLI, I am now saving for a better mobo and a new processor (seems that AMD is making the 939 socket go the way of the dinosaur). Plus, even though it says I can go as high as 4GB of RAM, the actual specs only allow for three with the rest for the restore partition or something like that, despite the board having four slots.
All the tech talk is actually interesting to me... anyone else care to share some system specs about their rigs?

One thing that people tend not to bear in mind when it comes to sound quality - the motherboard's chipset.

If your AMD is one of the older ones reliant on a VIA KT chipset, therein lies your problem. I went from awesome sound quality on an nVidia nForce board (an Abit NV7-133R specifically) to utter crap on a replacement VIA board (KT600A chipset) due to going from HyperTransport-backed onboard audio (nvidia's precursor to the nF2 SoundStorm chipset) to generic PCI-bussed RealTek sound (even though both effectively had the same damn sound chip). One was slaved to a serial HT bus, the other was slaved to PCI. Onboard sound tends to suck when slaved to native parallel PCI, yet it's completely unhindered with serial HT.

I ended up having to use a sound card with tweaked PCI latency values simply to get halfway-decent sound out of that rig, and I dumped it two years ago in favor of an AMD64 with HT and onboard sound. Never looked back.

Course, your speakers and/or their connections could also be at fault, but I'm sure that's already been covered.