Popping noises whenever you hear sound

[ConundrumMSU]

Rather odd situation with three different systems. All three have different sound chips/cards. One has on-board, one has creative, and the third has a 3'rd party sound card (the two cards are PCI of course).

Whenever the OS loads on all three of them, popping noises come through the headphones or speakers. You can hear it in games. You hear it if you load ventrilo whenever a wav file is played. You hear it the loudest typically when the OS is loading, and you're at the splash screen. Right when it loads the sound drivers. All three systems have the most updated drivers, and none of the hardware diagnostic tests are showing any problems with the systems.

Anyone have any ideas?

Three different operating systems as well. Windows XP on one, Windows 7 on the other, and Vista on the last one. I'm at a loss as to what the cause might be. I even tried swapping in new sound cards I knew were good just to test it that I knew were good, and the popping noise was STILL there. So odd..

 

[THRiLL KiLL]

dirty power?

try plugging them in at a different power source.

if it doesnt pop after that, get a cheap battery backup unit and it will clean up the power

 

[oynaz]

Is the onboard rig a laptop? If so, try runnning it off the battery and see if that kills the problem.

 

[Uncle Bob]

Seems to me that you should be looking at causes external to the PC's as I can't see any commonality - three different rigs and three o/s

Is there an external amp involved? Does it happen with the headphones jacked directly into the pc?

 

[C1]

Your description of the supposed issue is confusing or does not make sense. How can "You hear it in games, loading ventrilo or whenever a wav file is played" when the OS is loading?

Until the OS finishes loading, none of the above actions should be possible.

A possibility might be to install a batch file in startup that sets sound card volume to zero (or enables mute) in the system.ini at startup and one that does the same just before shutdown.