(never mind, I hadn't noticed the followup blog post.)

I suspect that the culprit maybe audio-level DRM at work with Vista.

My onboard Realtek doesn't look too shabby for vista...

In what real-world circumstance are you recording and playing back at the same time?

Good luck on Creative responding to anything if it doesn't earn them money.

Btw, I'm still pissed that their latest driver update more or less ruined my X-Fi Elite Pro. My breakout box has just become a very expensive and ugly paper weight.

Y'know what that looks like to me? Constructive and destructive interference. If two copies of the test signal are mixed together with one of them greatly reduced in level and slightly delayed, you'd get a response curve something like that as the frequency varies. I wonder if some of the test signal that RM outputs is leaking back into the recording signal path through a mechanism other than the loopback? That could explain it.

I think "Unraveling" is a cute headline, in light of the tangled-looking response curve =)

By the way, even when "Working correctly" the Realtek and Creative have a frequency-response plunge starting at ~16kHz. Can you guys find some young whippersnapper that can hear in that range and see if it sounds as bad as it looks? Because there's really no excuse for not supporting sounds above 16kHz even in an audio stream with Nyquist frequency 22050Hz, let alone the Nyquist frequency of 48kHz at 96kHz samples. So I wonder if this is a readily audible difference in someone who can hear well in the range.

Also, does the test software go above 20k? Because if it does, then it looks like Asus is also putting in an arbitrary cutoff (though ~4khz higher). And if it doesn't... I have to wonder why not.

P.S. If you do end up retesting anything... I would love to see the results of retesting the onboard sound while moving the mouse around and scrolling windows. Not that onboards can't cope with such a demanding scenario of USING A MOUSE AND LISTENING TO SOUND AT THE SAME TIME (and who would do that anyway?) but maybe I've had bad experiences in the past... and yet for some reason I never see anything about it in reviews.

Think Creative would ifx this in drivers? haha, good one :) Maybe auzentech will push them to fix it though, they've been good at getting driver updates and fixes.

interesting... you guys are awesome for looking into this and posting about it.

Very interesting. Thanks very much for looking into this, Geoff. I look forward to Creative's doubletalking excuses.

Wow. I don't have any of the cards, but I dig you guys taking the time to document the issue on a 2 year old piece of hardware. Kudos to you.

Did the two systems both run Vista?

I wonder if it is a "Vista" issue, either driver related (alchemy) or new vista audio components.........on the other hand, maybe it is some kind of internal card sound loop, kinda like when you plug a switch into itself, or record a display that is displaying what is being recorded, etc...

Is the card maybe swinging back and forth trying to compensate for itself raising or lowering playback and recording frequencies?

"We've contacted Creative about the issue and hope they'll respond with a solution." -> Creative? LOL

If I got it right then you cannot record 'what you hear this way', right?