Is this EMI affecting the sound card?

[AnhydrousWater]

I wrote this post over at tomshardware but never got a response, so I figured I would try it here before attempting to make an EMI shield for the card.



"At the end of 2014 I built a new computer. The sound card is a creative sound blaster z (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829102048) and the board is a gigabyte g1 gaming 7 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128708)

When playing with a friend(s) using Steam's built in voice chat (always open mic) the other person would hear this annoying buzzing sound. It sounds like someone is holding one of those electric hair clippers right up to the microphone. The sound never constantly happened (except once), and to me seemed like it mainly appeared during loading screens and right after them, sometimes randomly through out game play (I usually play with this one person and always have had an echo with them, that's how I knew when the noise was happening at times). During one specific game though and when using the voice chat with multiple people the sound was constantly buzzing.

I couldn't figure out what was causing it and when I tried searching on the net all topics that came up were basically dealing with or pointing to EMI. So I pulled it out of the system around a year ago and just used on board audio which worked fine. I just put the sound card back in last week since I decided to clean the whole inside of the rig and finally install win 10.

Besides other people hearing that noise, everything else seems fine. Sound is crystal clear, and any time I briefly tested the mic by listening to my voice through my own headset, the audio was clear. I'm running SLI and the sound card is in the top PCI x1 slot next to the first GPU. The only other available PCI x1 slot would be right next to the second GPU and then it would be in between both cards also.

I never even experienced or heard of this problem with EMI until I had this happening. Tried a bunch of things, can't recall everything I tried at the moment, but I am mainly making this post to see if anyone who is more familiar with sound cards even thinks this is EMI before I start traveling down this road any further. My next step was going to be making an EMI shield around the card since I don't know what else to try.

Mic/headphone is plugged directly into the cards ports."


Thanks

 

[Burpo]

Make sure you have a good ground. Use a 3 prong plug and maybe even try a different outlet/power strip.

 

[sm625]

First you have to get this "other people " thing out of the equation. Configure your system so that you can hear the sound yourself. (loop the mic into the headphones.) Then you can start messing around with stuff to get the sound to go away.

 

[AnhydrousWater]

Make sure you have a good ground. Use a 3 prong plug and maybe even try a different outlet/power strip.

Tossed the plug directly into its own outlet and a different one that it was on. Hopefully i'll get to test it some time this weekend.

First you have to get this "other people " thing out of the equation. Configure your system so that you can hear the sound yourself. (loop the mic into the headphones.) Then you can start messing around with stuff to get the sound to go away.

I have tried that, all though never mentioned how long in my original post. I have tried it any where from a few minutes while just on the desktop to around an hour playing something solo and I never hear anything. Only other thing I can think of since you brought it up is see if I have a game on an alt steam account that I have on my main one, and connect to a game and voice with both accounts and listen on my laptop and mess with options when I hear the noise since that is the only time the damn thing ever seems to appear, in a game.

Thanks