linux is a hydra of many different heads..... i am just the dumb head of linux ........ my sound card no work man... it works.... but then it doesn't..... isn't that nifty

Wow, the old Ensonic 1371/Vibra 128. It should sound worse than the VT1708S on your motherboard, the ES1371 is pretty much an AC97 card.

BTW, I've had similar issus with creative SB live cards recently. I pretty much gave up and installed a different, non-creative sound card (I didnt have time to try out some things). After reading this I'll go back and have another try. I'm not holding out much hope though, its just a final try before I get rid of the creative cards.

I had an es1371. It was kicking around here until I threw it away. Creative soundblaster 64 or somesuch. My kids insisted on it for their box - "no shit, get the real thing!" (vs halfassed isa soundcards).

Boy were they wrong. There was a very sobering doc in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/(oss)/es1371.txt(removed) that laid bare what a piece of absolute crap it really is. You could not even do 'cat somefile > /dev/dsp0' to see if it made noise. It won't even perform in windows with 20 Megs of creative drivers. Don't waste time.

LMAO. I know of 2 people who got SB64/SB128 (PCI) cards, and went running back to AWE 32/64 (ISA) within days.

IMO the whole buying out of ensonic was where creative went from reasonable to 'OMG can you people just make a decent card please! while your at it, can we have a model numbers that mean something....'

Ah Yes, happy days.
I was working in the attic when the es1371 was around and my kids had a pc of their own (To keep them off mine). Businessmen running factories would ring up about their critical pcb repair that was costing them hundreds of €€ per hour and the place could sound like a games arcade. "Yes, I'm working on it now. . ." rang kind of strange in those circumstances

Then they installed a Screensaver which came on randomly and thundered "All your base are belong to us! You have no chance to survive! Make your time!" followed by top volume music :/. They were getting that out of an old Opti soundcard, btw - not the soundblaster junk.