Speakers

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ron
  • Start date Start date
R

Ron

My existing speakers started putting out a lot of static along with the
sound. I tossed them since they were old and bought a medium priced set with
sub-woofer. They put out just much static as the old ones. Where should I
look?

thanks.
 
Loose jacks on the sound card, wear from installing the
speakers?

Try a headset. Try some different files and file types,
too. You can update your on-board sound drivers [check the
mobo site]. If that does not help, try better cables, there
could be some local noise getting into the speaker wires.

Try a different player, MusicMatch, Jet Audio, Windows Media
Player. If you have to, you can disable the on-board sound
and install a PCI sound card, available from Creaative Labs
or Turtle Beach.


| It's on the motherboard.
|
|
| | > Time to replace sound card?
| >
| > Ron wrote:
| >> My existing speakers started putting out a lot of
static along with the
| >> sound. I tossed them since they were old and bought a
medium priced set
| >> with sub-woofer. They put out just much static as the
old ones. Where
| >> should I look?
| >>
| >> thanks.
| >
|
|
 
Ron said:
It's on the motherboard.
Click to expand...

Have you muted inputs to the sound chip ? Sometimes an
open microphone input, with the microphone volume unmuted
and turned up, can ingest garbage. I'd start by muting
the sound inputs (sometimes inputs are hidden in the control
panel, until you find the right button). Also, if you have
the CD audio cable hooked up, between the CD drive and the
sound chip, disconnect it from both devices. CD audio can be
carried by DAE (digital audio extraction, travelling digitally
on the interface cable to the drive), so the cable is not
needed. The CD audio cable functions as an antenna for
electrical interference.

The input levels may have changed, right after you installed
something that uses sound or multimedia. So think back to
whatever software you've installed, and when the static
first started.

Crackling can also be due to underruns on the audio sound
buffer. Possible fixes in the BIOS would be PCI Latency [32]
and Delayed Transaction [Enabled], but these fixes are more
typical of older motherboards. Some of the newest motherboards
don't show options like this, because they are already enabled.
PCI Latency affects the max transfer length an individual
PCI device can do, and "bus hogging" can lead to sound card
starvation, when the sound card needs its next chunk of sound
samples.

Also, if you want test tools, Audacity is a free sound editor.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/

With Audacity, you can set up a test tone (a sine wave), as a
test source. Now, I couldn't get recording and playback to work
at the same time, when I was playing with Audacity, but if you
use a separate sound recorder tool, you can plug a 1/8" mini-plug
cable from the green Line_out, to your Line_in. Play the sine
wave, and see what comes back on the recording. Knowing what kind
of distortion is present in the waveform (flat spots, spikes, etc),
may help identify what the source of the problem is. But doing
testing like that isn't exactly easy, like getting Audacity to
work the first time :-)

I detected that my built-in sound driver was using reverb,
even when it wasn't supposed to (disabled). So Audacity can be
a useful tool, for figuring out what's up with sound.

Paul
 
Back
Top