problems with Diamond Xtremesound DDL

[darkride]

I recently purchased this card as a replacement for my sb live 24-bit usb unit, with which I could easily plug in a mic, my guitar, whatever.. no problem..
Now I had this card a couple weeks before I tried, and in my confidence sold the usb unit in that time, but when I got around to trying it out, anything but muting the mic-in on this card results in distorting the front channel output.
I can keep the input slider VERY low and not notice it, but by the time it's 1/3 of the way up the distortion seems to overcome the front channel resulting in no output, all this without even plugging in anything to the mic port.
I went through many scenerios, including a OS reinstall by the time I even figured out the mic-in was the culprit. I have the same problem whether I boot to xp 32 bit with the drivers from the cd (apparently the only place you can get diamond sound card drivers, not on their site), or using x64 with the beta montego drivers (they use the same cmedia chip)...
I even tried using onboard AC'97 codec for input with the card for output, but I can't seem to get any sound through that way, windows doesn't seem to want to accept the idea of seperate cards..
any more ideas before I go out and buy my 4th sound card since I gave up NF2/soundstorm in december?

 

[astrallite]

Sell the card on eBay?

If this is the fourth card since you went from onboard, did they all share this problem?

Also, you could just mute the mic slider every time you play something with a sound card, this seems to be the easiest solution.

 

[darkride]

no, they didn't share the issue, atleast definetly not the SB Live, the only one I tried the mic with.. the reason I went through those sound cards is I was looking for the 5.1 AC3 output through SPDIF to my reciever, which I finally found in this card..
trouble is, I want to use the mic input, in fact it's pretty important to me..

 

[astrallite]

You might just consider getting an analog PCI sound card and running analog channels direct to your receiver.

The noise floor between going digital to a analog receiver and using analog interconnects from a sound card to be directly amplified only (no processing) should be neglible, unless you have a digital switching receiver, in which case, yes, the noise floor differential will be audible.

 

[darkride]

funny you should say that.. because the week after getting this card I bought another reciever, which unlike the one I was using at the time, has 5.1 analog inputs... and I'm using them now (was hoping going all analog on the card would fix this). using the old one to run the other output and finish off 7.1

had just hoped this was a known issue, with a known fix... I've soaked alot of cash into my sound now.. so I'm getting it right one way or another..