Nameless Voice on 15/3/2009 at 00:52
Lately, I've been hearing an annoying buzzing noise when using my headphones. I'm using the built-in Realtek HD audio on my Gigabyte P35C-DS3R board, and my headphones are a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7s.
The buzzing only seems to happen when doing certain things, possibly when there's a heavy hard disk and CPU load - I can hear it when watching HD videos from the hard disk and while playing certain games. I can also hear some interference when I minimise and maximise things in Windows.
It's mostly noticeable when there's not much happening sound-wise, e.g. during quiet parts of the film.
It also happens even when the sound itself is muted.
The noise is louder when the sound card jack is set to "headphones", but I still get interference to a lesser extent when it's set to "line out". I can only barely hear the sound on my speakers if I turn the volume all the way up, but it's still there. It's also much harder to hear when the noise reduction and amplifier on my headphones are turned off, but again it's still there.
I've only had the headphones for a relatively short time, but I've only started to notice this even more recently.
I can't think of anything relevant that I've changed since getting the headphones. I've just tried installing the latest drivers, both downloaded from Gigabyte and directly from Realtek, but they don't do any good. I also found suggestions to disable or disconnect the PC speaker, but that didn't make any difference either.
I found (
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1090248) this thread on some random forum where the original poster seems to be describing the exact same problem, but of course there's no solution there.
Any thoughts? I can't bear to watch films on my headphones like this any more, it's driving me mad. :erg:
Enchantermon on 15/3/2009 at 02:48
What if you use a different pair of headphones? Same thing?
Do you have a mic input? If so, is it muted? It's a long shot, but it might be feedback or interference from that.
Nameless Voice on 15/3/2009 at 03:12
The microphone (and all other input sources) are muted. I don't have any other decent headphones available to try right now, but since normal headphones don't have amplifiers in them it would probably be to quiet to be noticeable or intrusive.
doctorfrog on 15/3/2009 at 03:17
Might just be line noise. A PC is filled with high-voltage circuits, and an onboard sound chip generally doesn't filter it out, in my experience. With my headphones on, I can hear noises when hard drives spin up, certain imagery is displayed onscreen, etc.
My solution was to get a pair of phones with a volume control. With the volume at around 80% on the phones, and the computer volume turned up a bit, the line noise is too quiet to be heard, whether sound is playing or not.
Enchantermon on 15/3/2009 at 03:59
Hmm. It probably is line noise, then, like df said.
baeuchlein on 15/3/2009 at 13:06
You can try to disconnect all of the external cables you do not need to run the computer and try it again. This helps in some rare cases, although the strange sound effects one can hear in these cases are usually not connected to anything the computer does (CPU activity, changes on the screen and such).
If that does not help, maybe there's a bass or treble control in the sound mixer which you can use to make the audio distortions a bit less distracting, but of course this will affect the sounds you want to hear as well.
If you have audio cables running from your CD/DVD drives to the mainboard or the sound chip, try to disconnect them near the board (not at the rear of your drives). These cables might act as receiving antennas for some kind of noise.
I heard of one case where a bug in the sound driver caused some distortions, so maybe an older or newer driver could help.
And if even that does not help, then I have run out of ideas, unfortunately.
Nameless Voice on 15/3/2009 at 14:51
I tried installing an old discrete C-Media sound card, but that's even worse - it hisses constantly, even when the computer is doing nothing and it also makes the same buzzing noise under the conditions that cause it on the onboard audio.
I recall recently adjusting the front audio connections (shortly after getting the headphones) because they weren't working, so I tried disconnecting them all from the motherboard - no change.
I don't have a CD/DVD audio cable connected.
I tried unplugging everything else in the room, including the computer itself (letting it run off the UPS) - no change.
I tried disconnecting every cable from the PC apart from the power and the keyboard - still no change.
baeuchlein on 15/3/2009 at 16:51
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
I tried installing an old discrete C-Media sound card, but that's even
worse - it hisses constantly, even when the computer is doing nothing
and it also makes the same buzzing noise under the conditions that cause it on the onboard audio.
So, the noise is introduced even into a separate sound card. That gives me some new ideas, at least...
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
I tried unplugging everything else in the room, including the computer itself (letting it run off the UPS) - no change.
I tried disconnecting every cable from the PC apart from the power and the keyboard - still no change.
Connecting the computer to an UPS (with the UPS' power plug pulled out of the wall socket) is a good idea in this case. By doing that, many feedback loops can be avoided. These feedback loops can occur if a computer has more than one connection to electric ground - which it usually has: The audio lines have one ground connector, and the power line to the wall socket has another. Feedback loops of that kind often result in some kind of buzzing noise.
So, it's not that. And since the problem occurs even with a separate sound card, I think it may be some kind of (electric) noise introduced into the +5 V lines in the computer, thus reaching every PCI device. I would suspect either the power supply or some voltage regulators on the mainboard, or maybe some weird interaction between this specific mainboard and this specific power supply.
If you have another computer at hand, install the C-media sound card into it and check whether the sound is OK then. (It should be, but I can be
very suspicious if it comes to hardware problems...)
If the sound is OK with the second computer, you can swap the power supplies and check whether any one of the computers has problems with the sound now. If there's no problem, enjoy!
If the problem is still with the same computer, then it's likely something from the mainboard (the posting found in another forum already hints at this). If the problem wandered along with the power supply, then the power supply obviously is the "bad guy" in this case.
And once you have done all these experiments, you should be able to see which part of the machine causes the trouble. (Let's hope so, at least...:tsktsk:)
Nameless Voice on 23/3/2009 at 23:27
I was able to reduce the noise by moving the headphones to one of the other output jacks on the sound card. It's still there, but not quite as noticeable.
I'm loathe to try swapping the PSU out since that would involve taking the computer almost completely apart, and I generally have bad luck with things going wrong if I take a computer apart that much.
In any case, I have a fair idea as to what the problem is now: the my nVidia 8800GT.
I was told by someone else with a similar problem that interference and noise is a common issue on the nVidia 8xxx line - a common complaint which nVidia refuse to acknowledge is a problem.
Apparently it happens when the graphics card is outputting an extremely high number of frames per second - which it shouldn't be doing in games since I have vsynch set to Force On, yet I still hear some noise when a game is running.
This sounds about right, too. From the nVidia forums. No replies:
(
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=76261&hl=headphones)
(Though running a HD video at postage stamp resolution doesn't seem to get rid of the noise for me.)
baeuchlein on 24/3/2009 at 13:59
If the graphics card is somehow causing this problem, there are one or two things you could do to verify that.
If you have another graphics card, put it into the computer and see whether the noise vanishes.
If you have no other graphics card, turn on the computer and enter BIOS setup. Now check whether the noise is audible. If it is, then you could turn off the computer, take out the graphics card and turn the poor crippled machine back on. It will not boot, but you can listen again for the noise. If the graphics card caused it, the noise should be gone now.
Unfortunately, even in this case the graphics card might not be the only part in the computer which creates the noise. It might be a combination of the mainboard and the card, for example. So, before you buy another graphics card, you should try to check out wheter a new one might create the same problems once again. A friend's graphics card could be used for that purpose. If the friend won't give you the card, hire Garrett to steal it.:cheeky:
If none of the above ideas works for you, you could try to get a program which does a lot of calculations but does not display much on the screen. In that case, the graphics card can sit around idle while the processor is far from being idle. If the noise is gone, then, the graphics card likely causes the problem (although maybe some other part of the computer is involved as well). If the noise is present, maybe even clearly audible, the graphics card does not seem to be guilty of audio distortion.
