I installed Myst V today and then went to play it. However, in about two or three minutes, I suddenly had a horrendous buzzing noise come out of my speakers, and it would not stop coming out. I have the latest drivers for my graphics and sound, and I installed directx 9.0c. It still hasn't gone away, and I was wondering if this is a problem with the game, or if anybody else has had this problem using Soyo motherboards with the AC '97 audio chipset. The problem also occurs in the demo version.

Most likely, your sound chipset either doesn't support EAX or doesn't support it properly. (EAX is the acronym for Environmental Audio Extensions. It's a Creative Sound Blaster thing that's now pretty much a gaming industry standard.)

You can determine if your sound chipset supports EAX by running DxDiag, saving the report to a file, and then looking in the file under 'Sound Devices'. (For details on running DxDiag, refer to Myst V: System Requirements and Posting Guidelines.) If you see something like 'EAX(tm) 2.0 Listen/Src: No, No', then....

With that said, take a look at Extremely loud sound, especially hogarth's post of Sun October 02 2005 11:13 and Bigfootwallace's post of Sat October 15 2005 20:21. Turning off EAX support in the EoA game settings and/or turning down audio hardware acceleration should solve the problem for you.

I tried disabling EAX, but that did not solve the problem. I also tried turning down various sound effects, but that also did not fix the problem. DxDiag says I am capable of running EAX 2.0. What do you mean by turning down the audio acceleration? Where do I do this?

See Bigfootwallace's post of Sat October 15 2005 20:21 in Extremely loud sound..