OldJawBone

Many thanks to both Gary and Jim for pointing me in the right direction. When I scrutinized my “Soundblaster Live!” card it actually also held the text “Digital”. It seems that my old FIC VB-601 MB is not able to handle digital sound. The only connection (on the sound card) to a CD is a S/PDIF connection which I don’t have. Earlier I have used this sound card on an XP system with a MB that can handle digital audio.

Upon making an inventory among my old sound cards to find a replacement, it turned out that the only working one was an old IDE-card manufactured about back when the steam engine was invented. But all the same, after some (hard) thinking Windows ME correctly identified it and installed SoundBlaster 16 drivers from it’s dungeon.

Now I can play anything ( well, at least Neil Young) I want and as long the old drivers don’t interfere with any other hardware I will stick to this configuration.

I’m reluctant to write that the solution was to install an IDE-card. Better than that the problem was, that I was using newer hardware (the soundcard) on a MB that was too old to handle it. I will mark the thread as solved as soon as I have figured out how.

All good things, Peter