USB sound card problems

[superfastkyle]

I have a toshiba l25-1193 laptop and I have had a soundblaster extigy hooked up to it awhile now. But sometimes I have pops, clicks, and 1-2 second pauses coming though. and it will usually take a couple hours of fiddling to get them to stop. But honestly I never have any idea how I do it. I usually just switch things around on my usb ports and reinstall drivers and restart a few dozen times until I get it to start working. I dont think it has anything to do with my extigy as I tried two other usb sound cards and got the same problem. The weird thing is it reallly seems to work better when I had my usb hard drive plugged in (power wires came out of the circuit board on it, but thats another story). So somehow does my computer maybe allocate more resources to usb with it plugged in? System information doesnt show any conflicts if that helps.

Any help would be appreciated

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Since you are getting no replies here's my 2 cents. I assume your sound device is plugged into the USB port. The sound may be using near the limit of power on the port. Borrow a powered USB Hub an give that a try. If it works then that's the problem. Maybe!
Good Luck, Jim

 

[superfastkyle]

Well I had a friend at my moms work resolder the hard drive wires, plugged it back in and wallah my sound is fine again. But this still is pretty annoying, as I might want to bring my extigy in the other room without bringing the hd along, since I'm too woried about breaking the wires off again (dont have spare $50 to waste on a good one). don't be like me and buy a crappy cintre case

One thing I do know is it doesnt have anything to do with which drive I am actually playing the files from. But when it is messed up some specific things always seem to mess up the sound. The shutdown sound always pops, opening device manager always causes pops. But when all is normal I have no problems. My usb HD drive obviously is USB 2, while the extigy is USB 1 so could this have something to do with it? But the weird thing is I don't believe I have them on the same usb channel anyways, I dont believe my laptop usb ports are shared in anyway since device manager lists 3 usb hubs and I have 3 ports am I correct? but then again it lists 2 usb host controllers, so that confuses me. if there are just two channels I still think they would be on seperate channels since two are on the side where I plug in my HD and I plug in the extigy in the back.

Also does this mean anything?
USB host controller 1 'advanced tab'
system reserved 10%
usb host controller 2 advanced tab
system reserved 11%
usb composite device (believe it is the extigy) 17%

Could I somehow force more bandwidth allocated? The extigy has its own power supply along with the hd, so I dont think it has anything to do with that. I do have it on a 12 foot monster usb cable, but I've heard it cut out on a 3ft cable just as much. Also have tried on a powered hub and not on a hub and that makes no difference. Sorry for such a long post but hopefully you will have some answers for me. It kinda sucks trying to get a discontinued soundcard working, but it does seem to have a better dac then anything I own so I love it. Also fun running my cd/dvd player through it and still having computer audio mixed in.

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi again, The power supply leads to the HD would definitely cause problems such as noise etc. They were probably already loose in the PC board. Sounds like you got it licked. Jim

 

[superfastkyle]

Just thought I'd give an update on this problem in case someone else ever does. Since my last post I have bought a dedicated htpc and have bought a couple new external usb enclosures, also bought an extra usb 2 pci card thinking that might help. I still after awhile of listening get these audio dropouts. They actually got more severe when I switched to my new HD enclosures (that look alot better made too). But I have found that turning the extigy off and back on seems to fix it, at least for a while. Since I get worse interference on my TV out with these new HD enclosures I have come to the conclusion that it must be ground loops that make my audio cutout. Obviously it doesnt seem to make much sense that noise could interfere with a digital signal. but it must interupt the signal somehow. Cause I've changed everything there is to change now, different sound cards, different computers, different hd enclosures, different usb contollers, theres nothing left to change.

But I've been thinking maybe I should just buy a SATA card and get sata external cases. Or do you think I would still have ground loops? I honestly dont know much about sata so I thought maybe you guys could help. Are they self-powered too, or can you get power off the ps? I guess theres always switching to an internal soundcard but the built in sound has horrible buzzing with the HD's plugged in.