Monitor produces very high frequency sound when a spreadsheet is showing.

[Jeff7]

And it's kind of getting annoying.

I just took a recording and checked out the spectrogram in Goldwave - there are several frequencies being produced, in kHz, around: 3.7, 7.6, 11.3, 15.1, 19.0

This monitor better not be getting ready to die, it's not even a year old - and it's a new warranty replacement for another monitor; the backlight inverter died on that one.

It's an LG l227W LCD monitor, running with the DVI input.


MP3 audio sample
Mind your volume.
Replace the file extension with flac or wav for those filetypes if you want lossless.

For some idea of the volume, the mouse clicking around 7 seconds was 2 feet from the microphone.
All I did to change the sound was to minimize Excel.


What gives here?

 

[DSF]

I don't know what causes the problem. I had an annoying squeal with a CRT a few years back. Progressively got worse and worse until one day it just stopped working, and Dell replaced it under warranty. The squealing would pop up every so often even with the replacement unit, but it was generally not an issue. The one time it would always squeal, for whatever reason, was when running the Battlefield series of games.

I say this not to suggest that your monitor is about to die on you nor to offer any suggestions for how to remedy the problem. I just want to reassure anyone who may try to tell you that the noise (and the connection to Excel) are in your head that such things can happen.

 

[PottedMeat]

Are you sure it's the monitor? Did you change any volume controls lately? It may have always been there. If I put the gain all the way up on my old compaq laptop I can hear a similar sound when scrolling as well as moving the mouse. I figure it's shitty isolation between the USB/soundcard and the video card.

Something could also be dying in the monitor power supply -> widely changing load ( when you scroll ) gets induced in the cable -> induced in sound output.

Is it a sound you hear directly from the monitor? Or is it from the speakers?

If it's from the monitor it could be inductor whine -> whatever they used to dampen the sound may not be good enough.

 

[Jeff7]

I'm quite sure it's the monitor.
The speakers were turned off, and as soon as I turn off the monitor, the sound stops. 🙂
The sound is not caused by scrolling; apparently it's just the grid pattern in Excel that makes the monitor do this. A screenshot of Excel does the same thing, so it's not the application.

Originally posted by: DSF
I say this not to suggest that your monitor is about to die on you nor to offer any suggestions for how to remedy the problem. I just want to reassure anyone who may try to tell you that the noise (and the connection to Excel) are in your head that such things can happen.

And if it were just in my head, my audio software's spectrum analyzer wouldn't show those peaks I mentioned.🙂
Screencap
y-axis is frequency, x-axis is time. Definitely something there.


Probably just inductor whine then. I've encountered that a few times before, notably in a fairly new Seasonic power supply.