Audigy 2 crackling

[Chris2wire]

It stinks. Sounds great until theres too many "voices" (ya know, different things giving off sounds) on the screen then theres bad crackling. Example: In Rome:Total War the sound of elephants charging is wonderfully glass shattering with my 200w speaker system. Its great and rumbling. The sound of horses charging is great too, also the "charge" horn is loud and clear.

On my old Nforce2 SoundStorm all these things put together made a great audio experiance. But with the audigy, when you put all these things together it crackles BAD. Also happens in video where theres too many things going on at once.

Windows was just installed Tuesday so its still fresh, and Ive tried every PCI slot, now using slot3. Im out of suggestions.

 

[compaid]

I finally solved this terrible fault. March 2014

The audigy 2 crackling problem is caused by 4 faulty capacitors. Hold the board with the chips facing you. input skts to the left, gold edge connectors at the bottom.

You can see 4 tiny capacitors at the bottom right hand corner. These are too small to smooth the small power supply chips. The ripple is what causes the interference. You can prove this by pointing a hairdryer at this corner for a few secs whilst in your computer. If the sound improves then these are the culprit.The heat changes the capacitance a tiny amount.

You can either replace them with 50volt 100 uf electrolytic caps by removing them or carefully solder the new caps to the solder points on the rear. Make sure that the negative stripe is pointing the same way as the originals. Then glue them to rear of board with a glue gun making sure that the legs are insulated from everything.

Does it work-YOU BET IT DOES.

Mike

 

[mfenn]

Holy 10-year necro Batman! Closed.

mfenn
General Hardware Moderator.