Santa Cruz installation failure?
 

I have a working Dell PC with an AGP slot that I am planning to use as a capture rig. I picked up an ATI AIW 9800 SE and Turtle Beach Santa Cruz on eBay. So far, so good.

Plan A:
I disabled the onboard sound card and installed the Santa Cruz. It didn’t trigger “found new hardware” but 3 new entries appeared in device manager for Crystal SoundFusion devices. I then installed the drivers downloaded from the forum. The TB software checks couldn’t find the Santa Cruz installed. I tried updating the driver for the Crystal SoundFusion audio device by picking the Santa Cruz driver manually form the list. I thought this had worked as notifications popped up reporting that windows had found the new Santa Cruz devices… ….then it crashed to a blue screen, which reported the TBSC driver as the cause. I tried the traditional uninstall/reinstall but got the same results. As the PC was running SP3 with the usual rat nest of old software I assumed something was upsetting windows (as usual). Time for a more drastic approach…

Plan B
I installed both the AIW and SC and tried a clean install of XP SP2 onto a different hard drive. Installed the drivers for both, plus Huffyuv and LS VDub. Nothing else. The good news is that the AIW is capturing AVIs in VDub. The bad news is that the Santa Cruz behaved in exactly the same way as before.

I now have a nice working capture rig for silent movies! I am out of ideas, so any suggestions will be gratefully received.

There's a lot of bad TBSC cards on eBay, and lots of stupid/clueless/lying sellers that sell them. One of the most common ways for a card to fail is because the idiot seller shipped it in an envelope. The card is beat to hell in transit, and you'll be lucky if it's not snapped in half when it arrives (and that happens). The same happens to lots of good AIW cards, damaged by dunces.

What is "Crystal SoundFusion"?
That has nothing to do with a TBSC card. Are you sure it's the correct card?

Odds are the card is simply bad, faulty hardware.

Dell is just a brand. What are the exact motherboard model/specs?

I couldn't agree more about eBay sellers (apart from me, obviously). Luckily the AIW was in good shape and vet well packed. Including the remote control.

Turtle Beach Santa Cruz printed on the card. Look like all the photos I have seen online. The card is bound to be the number one suspect. It wasn't well packed but there is no obvious damage. I have soldered a lot of PCBs in my time and I can't see anything but that's often the case with a dead board, so doesn't prove anything.

The device manager entries are:

Crystal SoundFusion(tm) Audio Device
Crystal SoundFusion(tm) Game Port
Crystal SoundFusion(tm) WDM Interface

I think they are to do with the TBSC card because they only appear when it is in the slot. The largest chip on the SC card is also a Crystal CS4630-CM.

Dell Dimension 4600, Pentium 4 3.00 GHz 2.5GB RAM

Quick update: I dropped the Santa Cruz into another Dell XP box. Similar vintage but slightly lower spec. Not the best cross-check but it’s the only other XP desktop I have available. The results were almost identical. “Almost” because it gave a tantalising glimpse of SC control panel sliders just before the blue screen kicked in.

I’ve bought another TBSC card from a seller with good feedback. If it works then problem solved, and we know it was the original card that caused the issue. If it behaves the same it must be something to do with the pc, which is a bigger problem. Oh what fun we have!

The replacement card worked perfectly first time. Problem solved.

Thanks for prodding me in the right direction LS, it was indeed another dodgy eBay purchase.