Speakers crackle if any onscreen activity

[StrungOut]

Hi, I've never really heard of anything like this before. I'm assuming it's my soundcard but I need to be sure. Not sure if this will garner any response, but I figure it's worth a try.

My speakers crackle (quite heavily, to the point where there is actually slowdown in the music) whenever there is anything happening on my screen. It will be playing okay, but if a flash ad comes up with some movement, I hear crackling, if I load a webpage and new graphics show up, there will be crackling, and so on.

I've tried another set of speakers and it still did it, so I'm pretty sure that's not the problem.

I'm running Win XP Pro with 448 MB RAM, if that matters.

 

[TheCorm]

Mine sometimes slows and crackles if I am typing on the screen. very annoying. I am using XP pro also with a SB Live 5.1.

Whats your system spec? In particular MB, Soundcard & Processor.

If it's built in sound then this can often occur as it uses a larger amount of CPU overhead. If you have a dedicated soundcard live a Live, Audigy, Edge etc then it might be something else, try updating the drivers and maybe even changing the PCI slot it's in.

Jamie

 

[NikPreviousAcct]

Get better (read: better shielding) speaker cables?

 

[LesPaul]

I had this same exact problem with my integrated SB PCI128 sound on my old board.. When I upgraded to XP from 2000 and updated my sound driver the problem went away. Try out a few different driver versions for your card and see if any of them fix it.

 

[Zelmo3]

I used to get noise in my radio when it sat right above my CRT monitor and I moved the mouse cursor around. Sounds like an EMI thing.
Are your speakers shielded? Maybe try moving your monitor around to see if its proximity with other stuff is a problem.

 

[Teva24]

It's not an EMI thing, it's the video/sound driver locking the bus.

Everything will be playing ok until you try to do both at the same time. It's an old trick: there's a set buffer that each device can que up (commands) the driver tries to load up the que to the max (faster video/sound) and the system pci bus que is full, so when you say, move a window on the screen the video driver is trying to make video updates as fast as it can and there's no resources to stream audio without it crackling.

Simple: Say your system can queue up 8 commands at once. The video driver might be just dumping 8 commands to it (instead of checking to see if the previous command was finished first). so when the sound card tries to send a command it has to wait for the other 7 video commands that are competing on the same bus to finish, and during this the video driver keeps trying to put commands on the que and the process starts over again, causing audio skips. If you look very carefully when this is happening you might notice that the video isn't as smooth as when you aren't playing sound.

I've had this happen to me recently with a ATI AIW 9600 agp, updating the drivers fixed it.

Problem can be fixed by installing better drivers for video and/or sound.

There used to be a website that described this exact problem, but i can't find it... And my description of it is lacking... oh well. hope this helps.

At least thats what i've seen in the past.

 

[StrungOut]

Hey thanks for your guys' help. I looked up my card's serial # from the list at creative.com, and it says it's the Ensoniq AudioPCI. I tried to update the driver from there and it says "no soundblaster device detected on your system" when I try to install it.

System specs (don't laugh it's over 4 years old)

800mhz Duron
448 MB
Creative Audio PCI sound
Windows Xp pro

 

[MagicalPixieSticks]

Do you get some noise if you resize windows?

 

[MagicalPixieSticks]

try muting the line-in, that works on mine.

 

[StrungOut]

what do you mean by resizing windows?

muting the line in didn't work.

 

[JeffCos]

MagicalPixieSticks is right. I've had crackling in my speakers for quite some time now, but it didn't seem to be cause by anything it was just random crackling when i play music. So i tried muting the line in and I don't hear any more random pops or crackles. Granted it's kinda late here and people are sleeping so I can't crank it, but sounds better for now.

 

[JeffCos]

P.S. have you tried cleaning your contacts. Maybe you've had some corrosion or dust accumulation.

 

[StrungOut]

Hmm none of this stuff seems to work. I think I just need to find a driver that actually will install properly. Where else can I look beside Creative's official site?

 

[StrungOut]

God damn. The one driver I need is a corrupt file on driverguide.com

No other site seems to have it. Anyone else know a good driver site? I need this file: SBAudioSetup_W2k1.zip

 

[Mitzi]

Try these links off Google.

 

[StrungOut]

Yeah I did they all link back to DriverGuide.

 

[Teva24]

The updated driver is on windows update.com, you have to pick scan and it should fine a new one.

The ensonic card is no longer supported from creative i guess.

I went to windowsupdate.com and picked an option to browse the catalog.

This might be what you want, although my ensonic card might be slightly diff from yours, you will have look at the card itself and check the chipset.

http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/rtf/drivers/4046075.htm

if you download the driver directly, it'll be in a cab file, just open the cab copy the contents out and run the update driver wizard and point to that directory.

-Teva24