Did i just damage my sound card..?

[inf1nity]

OK. So first of all, i am a noob as far as audio mixing and recording etc is concerned, so please bear with me. Now some background. I have a LG CRT TV. It has those analog video and audio port(those round ones colored yellow, white and red), that i use to plug in a DVD player. My computer has a Jetway motherboard with an onboard Realtek soundcard. The rear panel has three ports, a red one called Mic In, a green one called Audio Out, and a blue one called Line In. My TV has a headphone jack that accepts a 3.5 mm jack.

So i was watching a movie on my DVD player hooked up to my TV. A song came up, and i wanted to record it. So i took a cable that had a 3.5 mm pin on both ends; plugged one end into the the TV's headphone jack other end into the computers Line In port. I opened up control panel set the Line In port as the "default recording device" and checked the listen checkbox. Now i was able to hear the audio through my computer speakers. I opened up audacity, and pressed record, but it recorded nothing. So i decided to plug in the cable to the Mic in port instead. However this time there was no sound output from speakers. After messing around a little i gave up. But then i found out that for some reason my computers audio had stopped working! I plugged my headset into the front panel, and opened an mp3 file, but instead of the music that i expected there was only a faint buzzing sound, lots of static and some whistling. Horrified, i plugged it into the rear audio out panel instead, but the result was the same buzzing. I reinstalled my audio drivers, but no effect.

This was on the night of 18th April. I then turned off my computer and went to sleep. Next morning turned it on again and checked audio. No improvement. Same buzzing sound and static noise, although the music was slightly audible if you turned up the volume all the way up to 100%.

What happened? Did i blow up my sound card by plugging in the TV? Does anyone know what "Line In" is used for? Did i plug in something that it was not designed to handle? What should i do now?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[mnewsham]

Give us a full spec run down of your computer.

Sounds like you possibly damaged the headphone amp...

 

[inf1nity]

I'm gonna post my specs from CPU-Z report..

Processors Information
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Processor 1 ID = 0
Number of cores 2 (max 2)
Number of threads 2 (max 2)
Name Intel Core 2 Duo E4500
Codename Conroe
Specification Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz
Package (platform ID) Socket 775 LGA (0x0)
CPUID 6.F.D
Extended CPUID 6.F
Core Stepping M0
Technology 65 nm
Core Speed 2200.0 MHz
Multiplier x FSB 11.0 x 200.0 MHz
Rated Bus speed 800.0 MHz
Stock frequency 2200 MHz
Instructions sets MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, EM64T
L1 Data cache 2 x 32 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64-byte line size
L1 Instruction cache 2 x 32 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64-byte line size
L2 cache 2048 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64-byte line size
FID/VID Control yes
FID range 6.0x - 11.0x
Max VID 1.300 V

Chipset
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Northbridge Intel i945G rev. A2
Southbridge Intel 82801GB (ICH7/R) rev. A1
Memory Type DDR2
Memory Size 1024 MBytes
Channels Single
Memory Frequency 333.3 MHz (3:5)
CAS# latency (CL) 5.0
RAS# to CAS# delay (tRCD) 5
RAS# Precharge (tRP) 5
Cycle Time (tRAS) 15
Bank Cycle Time (tRC) 21


This is my motherboard.
i also have a Hitachi HDD and my PSU is a crappy one that came free with my case, so as you might imagine its not very good.

 

[mnewsham]

Yeah you likely broke the internal sound card or something on the motherboard, but seeing as it's a platform from 2007, I can't say I am really surprised...

You need a new computer anyway, start saving.

 

[inf1nity]

So the sound card was damaged because i routed TV audio into it? And BTW do you know the real purpose of "Line IN" port?

 

[richaron]

In a very general sense, you can think of headphones outputs and line level ins/out as the same league (with line level inputs being a kind of standard for consumer AV). People often use the headphones output @ ~almost~ full volume (see 80-90%) and plug into a line level device.

A microphone level input is expecting much, much, less power than this. A normal microphone is not powered and produces a comparably small amount of energy, which is automatically amplified to be useful. Never done it myself, but one can only imagine the damage a high power input + amplification equals.

 

[mnewsham]

So the sound card was damaged because i routed TV audio into it? And BTW do you know the real purpose of "Line IN" port?

As the other poster said, likely when you plugged it into the microphone port, they expect very little power to come through, but a headphone or speaker will be pushing a lot more power into it than it is rated for, this likely cause some sort of malfunction in the unit and thus killed it entirely.

 

[inf1nity]

In a very general sense, you can think of headphones outputs and line level ins/out as the same league (with line level inputs being a kind of standard for consumer AV). People often use the headphones output @ ~almost~ full volume (see 80-90%) and plug into a line level device.

A microphone level input is expecting much, much, less power than this. A normal microphone is not powered and produces a comparably small amount of energy, which is automatically amplified to be useful. Never done it myself, but one can only imagine the damage a high power input + amplification equals.

So the problem is there because i plugged a high power output from my TV into the Microphone port which caused it to burn out?

 

[inf1nity]

can i get any help to fix this?

 

[Soundmanred]

can i get any help to fix this?

People are trying to tell you that there is most likely no "fixing" it. Replacement time (or just get a cheap soundcard).

 

[GrumpyMan]

Those line in's on old mobos and sound cards were usually for a video capture card to hook up sound to it, like Haupauge cards, not TVs. You have a choice, new motherboard or a cheap sound card to bypass the mobo's sound source. That's what people are trying to tell you.

 

[inf1nity]

Okay i will probably get a new motherboard and get a chipset, graphics and soundcard upgrade all in one go. Thank you everyone for your help.