Another soundcard thread :(

[Oceanic]

Well upon building my new system, i find that the AC97 onboard sound is static and noise added to normal sound. previously i had cmedia 8738 on board sound on my kt4 ultra and i used its 2 channel outputs with no noise.

so, i go and get a philips dynamic edge. games sound weird, theres noise.

so, i go and get a soundblaster live 24 bit. everything is ok, but one of my speaker sets,one i dont want to get rid of, somehow gets loud hiss non stop while the rest do ok. games sounded fine, so i was kinda mad.

so, i go and get a cheap cmedia card with the same chip that was on old mobo, hoping to get similar results. nope, noise and screech when you do different things in windows.

so, can anyone with a chaintech AV710 or a turtle beach card tell me with certainty that there is NO static,hiss,or noise under any circumstance, and games sound normal? im not being picky..its just that theres constant noise loud enough to be a bother

any other advice will be appreciated

 

[MDE]

Have you tried muting the extra inputs (mic, line-in) on the other cards?

 

[Oceanic]

yeah, tried everything pretty much

the SB live issue puzzles me, its putting out some weird signal one of my 3 speaker sets recieves as SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH lol

and the other c media cards noise is from cheap jacks i presume, since the chip was the same

 

[Oceanic]

is there a reason cards have hiss and noise? is it the chip? the quality of the connecting jack? if i used all my speakers for a year and never had noise once it has to be possible on another card. the same chip in pci card form gave me hiss, whats up with that?

does the chaintech av710 have ANY hiss or noise in normal 2 channel mode?

 

[fell8]

If it's only one set of speakers that hiss while the others don't, that would suggest that the culprit is that speaker set. Try hooking it up to a different sound source (stereo, walkman, different computer known not to hiss). If it is the speaker set, you could try different wires or twisting the existing ones. If that doesn't work, the issue may lie in the speakers' amp (assuming powered speakers). Replacing the amp is probably more trouble/expense than it's worth.

 

[Oceanic]

they acted fine with the other 2 soundcards, not them

 

[Gurck]

Chaintech av710 is a 7.1 card, so has 4 DACs - 3 of them are garbage, only one is high (very high actually) quality. Since music is by and large in stereo (2 channel) you can set it up to use that DAC for stereo output and music will sound great, but I'm not sure if I'd suggest it as a gaming card. If you can spare the bucks, pick up an Audigy 2 ZS.