Snap Crackle Pop, and no its not my cereal

[eedmond]

I unplugged my speakers and plugged the headphones into the speaker jack in the back of my computer and got them to crackle too.

Nope the Subwoofer is not a common denominator.

Celltower interference is unknown. I just know that it does not interfere with any other electronics within our household including TV's, speaker systems, cellphones, wireless phones, modems, and a 2nd computer.

-Eric

[confus-ed]

Ahhhh ! ... an 'I hate soundblasters' thread ... count me in ..

First thing ... we keep on 'wittering' about leads & connectors & speakers ... well standard audio cables are a bit like a big ariel, if there is any exterior interferance & they aren't well shielded they very kindly amplify it & project it out the speakers, good 'firm clean' contacts are a 'must' too.

The way to decide whether the card is at fault or the machine is either seperate the pc & cables from any possible interfereance (not really that practical) or why don't you use fibre optic cabling ? No interferance at all there from outside (alternatively 'well shielded cabling' if your speakers aren't digital).

Now as for whats going on in the pc ... its to do with pci bus signalling & how Soundblasters do it & priorities of request handling. There's also a whole hardware vs software decoding thing going too ...

Your onboard sound is almost certainly completely software based, that's where the cpu does pretty much all the work & the card itself has no memory or Codecs built in ... Your Audigy though is hardware based & has codec chips to do the decoding & a memory buffer to 'save up jobs' for the cpu as & when required.

Now if the 'geniuses' at soundblaster wrote drivers that complied with pci 2.1 specification as well as 'adjusting their cards' so they actually did comply instead of 'nearly' (they comply to some other related standard apparently) then when they flushed buffers everything would get done right, but because they 'tinkered' with the priorities for sound processing everything gets out of whack & you get PCI latency issues & snap crackle pop ! This is worse/better dependant on the motherboard bios, some are 'good' many though ... urrgh !

I don't know what to say now, this could well be interferance, or it could well be that you've 'fluked' a sucession of motherboards that don't like soundblasters!

If this is a VIA chipset board then there's a PCI latency patch by 'George' aka the 'soundblaster patch' over on www.ViaArena.com

[hudsonsmith]

On another path, do you have fluorescent or halogen light fixtures? Dimmers? Any other electrical appliances with a transformer?

[eedmond]

My bedroom light is a fluorescent bulb. One of those mini twisted things that plugs into a normal light fixture. I also have a 2nd computer in another room.

-Eric

[Diver01]

I dont know if this is whats happening to your PC, but I had simmilar issues with my Sound Card and inerference. What I found out was the soundcard was picking up interference from the Graphics card. I relocated the sound card to the bottom PCI slot and the interference dissapeared. I dont know if this would help you or not, just thought I would share...

[eedmond]

I dont know if this is whats happening to your PC, but I had simmilar issues with my Sound Card and inerference. What I found out was the soundcard was picking up interference from the Graphics card. I relocated the sound card to the bottom PCI slot and the interference dissapeared. I dont know if this would help you or not, just thought I would share...

I tried that. The sound card was originally in the 3rd PCI slot down from the AGP but then I moved it to the bottom one and I still had the problem.

-Eric

[tommo666]

I got pops and crackles on my sb live 1024 player. I did the lot. Drivers, installed the os over the top. Checked with creative support, who were most helpful seeing as it was an OEM card. Finally did the simple thing, checked the background processes and found it was SETI, that damm prg was throwing noise onto the pci bus. Uninstalled it and the pops got unistalled as well. I occationally get pops now but only in times of heavy CPU load.

Moral of this tale, before diving in feet first, check the easy stuff. But we're human and it's crawl under the desk, fight off years of dust. Prise the case open. Cut your hands on the sharp edges, swear, bang your head on the desk etc :-)))

[hudsonsmith]

My bedroom light is a fluorescent bulb. One of those mini twisted things that plugs into a normal light fixture. I also have a 2nd computer in another room.

-Eric

Does it pop if the light is off? 2nd computer shouln't matter - you're concerned about electrical equipment with transformers. I would experiment with turning off other equipment on the same circuit.

[imagoon]

I'm with confused here. I had a live and an audigy. They both had issues with pops clicks etc esp with anything that used the PCI bus hard, like the HDD's. This is a well known issue with sb lives and audigys. I finally got the Hercules Game theatre XP 5.1 and never had an issues after that. BTW there are some drivers that attempt to fix it but the SB cards are just not 100% compatible with the PCI standards. The tweaks they used did cause issues with some boards but others you cant get rid of the noise.

~Chris

Ahhhh ! ... an 'I hate soundblasters' thread ... count me in ..

First thing ... we keep on 'wittering' about leads & connectors & speakers ... well standard audio cables are a bit like a big ariel, if there is any exterior interferance & they aren't well shielded they very kindly amplify it & project it out the speakers, good 'firm clean' contacts are a 'must' too.

The way to decide whether the card is at fault or the machine is either seperate the pc & cables from any possible interfereance (not really that practical) or why don't you use fibre optic cabling ? No interferance at all there from outside (alternatively 'well shielded cabling' if your speakers aren't digital).

Now as for whats going on in the pc ... its to do with pci bus signalling & how Soundblasters do it & priorities of request handling. There's also a whole hardware vs software decoding thing going too ...

Your onboard sound is almost certainly completely software based, that's where the cpu does pretty much all the work & the card itself has no memory or Codecs built in ... Your Audigy though is hardware based & has codec chips to do the decoding & a memory buffer to 'save up jobs' for the cpu as & when required.

Now if the 'geniuses' at soundblaster wrote drivers that complied with pci 2.1 specification as well as 'adjusting their cards' so they actually did comply instead of 'nearly' (they comply to some other related standard apparently) then when they flushed buffers everything would get done right, but because they 'tinkered' with the priorities for sound processing everything gets out of whack & you get PCI latency issues & snap crackle pop ! This is worse/better dependant on the motherboard bios, some are 'good' many though ... urrgh !

I don't know what to say now, this could well be interferance, or it could well be that you've 'fluked' a sucession of motherboards that don't like soundblasters!

If this is a VIA chipset board then there's a PCI latency patch by 'George' aka the 'soundblaster patch' over on www.ViaArena.com