soundcard hisses and crackles....

T

TMFK

New member
OK I have currently 2 pcs, here are the specs.

1999 Compaq Deskpro EN series
P3 1ghz slot one
384 mb of pc100 ram
10 Gig seagate hard drive
Philips DVD rom
some cheap-o cdrom thats about shot.
Nvidia Mx/Mx400 64mb graphics card
Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer 5.1 soundcard.

pc2

Hp Pavillion 9900 configurable full tower
AMD Atlhon xp 1.2ghz
256 mb of ram ( soon to be upgraded to 512)
60gig quantum fireball.. heh junky h/d lol
DVD rom, Cdrom/Cdburner
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS 6.1 soundcard
Radeon 9600XT 128 mb graphics card.

ok my question is about pc1: When playing music, I occasionally get a crackle out of the speakers. what could cause this? its not the music, and its not the speakers. I originaly thought it might be crossover dist, but my speakers are Marantz SP1200's VERY high end, and there is absolutly no crossover dist or crackle with other systems like my cd player or my audigy 2ZS card, or my fisher fm tuner.
Also, the sound card has a low level hiss when your playing music.
Isnt noticable when you turn it up, unless theres no music playing then its about 40db or so ( i dont have a db meter, so im guessing with the amp on 4 and the pc all the way up.) but its pretty loud.

do I have a bad soundcard, or is it a ground problem? this soudcard has always hissed with any system I hook up to it, no matter what filtering I do, what EQ i use etc. Its a decent sound card, I am going to upgrade it soon though to a creative EMU 1820 series digital, because I am currently useing this pc for midi synthing in our band. any help on this prob would be greatly appreciated!!

TMFK~
 
I used to get pops and crackles with my SB live card ... try plugging everything in to a different outlet, there could be irregular power flow to the computer (which is not good at all). Hiss is caused in some sound cards by bad CD drives believe it or not. I had an old DVD drive in my comp and as soon as I took it out, the hissing stopped.
 
ok...

Well i have my pc on a power backup, cyber power battery backup. I also have a cdrom thats going bad, it skips and stuff when i play cds, but the crackle im hearing is when im playing audio off my hard drive, you know,stored music not on cds.
 
This is very similar to my problems. That doesn't help, but it makes me feel less alone ;)

I wonder about the mains supply - is there any way of knowing about that? My house is very old and the mains was put in 50+ years ago.
 
dunno...

dunno, our house was built in 1953, and up untill recently had the original wireing, we just rewired and its there... the sound card used to be in our old pc, and I dont remember if it hissed or not, but I certainly know it never crackled. A friend sugguested useing paper or ruber washers between the mobo and the chassis, but there are metal contacts at every place the mobo( actually a main board, because its a deskpro split board) mounts to the chassis tray.. any idea on what thats about? will the paper work?

thanks, TMFK~
 
OH btw

OH btw, I cant seem to find any drivers for XP for the Creative SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer 5.1, made in 2001.. I currently have a set of drivers from a Live Gamer, off of the creative drivers site... could it just be that my soundcard is obsolete, no longer supported with new drivers, and that its out of whack and thats whats causeing the crackle/pop/hiss probs?

thanks for any help,

TMFK~
 
Ok,

1) Your using a SoundBlaster, they are noisy, they have a high signal noise ratio, they are a cheap sound card. There isn't much chance of removing the hiss unless you pull all the CD drives out of your machine as suggested, and getting some shielded cabling. CRT monitors have a tendancy to add noise to audio cables.

2) I used to run a SoundBlaster Live on a Celeron 500 with 128mb of ram for recording. the only way to get it to work properly was to force it on its Own IRQ channel in the BIOS.

3) In the days of Windows XP its likely that all your PCI devices are sharing IRQ's (unless your running in Standard PC mode) Thus, when there are spikes in IO traffic accross the BUS you will experience Glitches in your audio stream.

4) Deskpro's are a Cheap PC designed for office workers, chances are the components like the moterboard has been manufactured cheeply to cut costs, if there is on-board audio, disble it if you can.
 
yah itsa cheapie...

yeah itsa cheapie, used for a portalble midi controller for band practice, i got it cuz it was cheap,I built it at a class for only 40 bucks.. LOL anyways..It DOES have on board audio, ESS audio drive ( wich is a pretty cool feature when turned on, it has a 3 watt amp onboard driving an oval shaped rubber-surround JBL pro speaker internally, mounted faceing outward and sounds pretty darned good!! but when running the SBcard, I have to disable ESS audio drive and switch to the SB for it so work at all, so unless I have to disable the ess somewhere else permanently, I dont think thats the problem...I dunno what cards you have used, but this is the only sb card I ave ever tryed that hisses, or is noisy. It didnt used to be that way, but it is now.. I have an audigy 2 zs and its crystal clear and DEAD SILENT when hooked up to anything, and I run a splitter into a gold plated monster cable dual RCA to go from the pc to my amp. NO hiss whatsoever, and my parents audigy 2 LS is also the same way.. certainly not pro audio cards, and altho the older cards like my sblive may be cheap, I certainly wouldnt call any of the audidgy line cheap..cept for mabye the value cards.. anyways thanks for the info, anything I can do to get this to stop, or do I need a new pc/and/or card? :eek:
 
Kid Downunder said:
3) In the days of Windows XP its likely that all your PCI devices are sharing IRQ's (unless your running in Standard PC mode) Thus, when there are spikes in IO traffic accross the BUS you will experience Glitches in your audio stream.
Click to expand...
That's an interesting thought ... I might look into that.
 
TMFK said:
yeah itsa cheapie, used for a portalble midi controller for band practice, i got it cuz it was cheap,I built it at a class for only 40 bucks.. LOL anyways..It DOES have on board audio, ESS audio drive ( wich is a pretty cool feature when turned on, it has a 3 watt amp onboard driving an oval shaped rubber-surround JBL pro speaker internally, mounted faceing outward and sounds pretty darned good!! but when running the SBcard, I have to disable ESS audio drive and switch to the SB for it so work at all, so unless I have to disable the ess somewhere else permanently, I dont think thats the problem...I dunno what cards you have used, but this is the only sb card I ave ever tryed that hisses, or is noisy. It didnt used to be that way, but it is now.. I have an audigy 2 zs and its crystal clear and DEAD SILENT when hooked up to anything, and I run a splitter into a gold plated monster cable dual RCA to go from the pc to my amp. NO hiss whatsoever, and my parents audigy 2 LS is also the same way.. certainly not pro audio cards, and altho the older cards like my sblive may be cheap, I certainly wouldnt call any of the audidgy line cheap..cept for mabye the value cards.. anyways thanks for the info, anything I can do to get this to stop, or do I need a new pc/and/or card? :eek:
Click to expand...

To eliminate your PC from the equasion... Pull your SB Live from your PC and chuck it in your Parents PC after removing the AUDIGY!! If you get no noise in that PC then you can assume its your PC, its Cabling, or Ground Hum noise... Conversly you could try throwing the AUDIGY in your PC...!!! Observe for the Cracks and Pops, they are hardware issues, if it works in your parents PC its a hardware issue...!!!

Your other option is to get into the guts of the BIOS and start trying IRQ assignments and slot assignment...Really study your control panel and figure out how to show devices by IRQ in device manager and how to check IRQ assignment in your PC bios... My SBLive only worked in one slot in my Celeron as I couldn't assign IRQ's properly in the BIOS and this particular slot was the only one where it could get an IRQ for its self and not share one.

I would disable the onboard Audio your PC manual might show you where on the MB the Jumper to disable it is...its probably sharing an IRQ with one of your PCI slots.

Otherwise build your own PC from the ground up, but you will still have to address all these issues..!!!
 
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