OK, I thought this might have been my imagingation, so I installed Mandy 8.0 on a spare partition (you know, everyone should have a partition just lying around...) and confirmed my suspicions. The sound from my SB Live is awful in Mandy 8.1 compared to 8.0.

Mandy 8.0 loads the modules sound, soundcore, and emu10k1, whereas Mandy 8.1 loads ac97_codec aswell. I suspect this is the candidate for the problems.

Has anyone else suffered this, and since I'll be d/l 8.2 in a few days (when the bloody room with 250Mb zip drives opens again...pah, bloody 100Mb drives), can you tell me if it's been sorted?

I can't remember what the sound is like in Slack, because I generally don't use it much.

Cheers muchly.

My SB live sounds pretty good through my crappy speakers. It loads the emu driver, not sure about the AC though.

Why major mobo manufacturers make the crappiest on-board sound as a selling point is beyond me. I never use it. I never like it. I always grab a SB Live+.

Turn it off in BIOS.

No prob here with 5.1 on Redhat 7.3.

i used slackware, mandrake, and red hat and my sb live sounds great. Maybe you need to try a reinstall. But thats all i can think on how to fix it sorry that doesnt help ya much.

Nah, re-installs are the same. Checked it out under RH7.2 last night, sounds as good as Mandy 8.0 - it only seems to be a problem associated with Mandy 8.1.

Oh, and I can't turn it off in the BIOS...it's a PCI card ...I had enough of on-board sound cards ages ago - too much trouble!