Background noise when playing audio CDs

SpriteAlpha

SpriteAlpha

SpriteAlpha

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Joined
20 Aug 2005
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369
Whenever I play a CD through my Dell XPS 15 laptop, there is background noise, like static. Music from the hard drive sounds fine, as well as audio from DVDs. When I rip the music from the CD to the hard drive, the static remains. The blu ray drive has been replaced, and yet the problem persists.

Any thoughts as to what the cause of this problem could be?
 
i see no reasos at all why the dvd drive itself has anything to do with this - it shouldnt be introducing static in to digitally ripped audio it really is making a meal of ripping discs but then you said you replaced the first drive - chances of the second drive doing the same thing is pretty much 0.

I can only think that it would be something to do with the sampling rate. most non-music audio is 48khz (including dvd). cd audio is 44.1khz. is your soundcard set to a different output rate? maybe the card isnt very good at resampling audio, try setting it to 44.1khz out.
 
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I've changed the sampling rate, but that hasn't fixed the problem. I think I've done everything I can at the software level.
Dell said they will probably replace the motherboard.
 
Hmmm, just found out this problem is only with certain audio CDs and not others. These 'problem CD's play fine on all my other players. This issue just gets weirder...
 
only thing I can think of to suggest is try a drive speed program so you can force read speed to 1x
 
I've just used Nero CD-DVD Speed program and ran "ScanDisc", which ran a surface scan on the CDs. On the ones with background noise, it came back with 100% damaged but on the phones which play fine it came back with 100% good.

Now, I know the CDs aren't damaged; one in particular is pretty much new, and all of them play fine on all my other drives and players.

I really think it's the optical drive. The fact that this same problem was present on the same drive they replaced tells me the model itself has problems playing certain CDs.

I will order an adapter kit to connect laptop drives to a USB port. I will try this drive on my desktop, and try my old laptop DVD drive on the Dell. This should confirm if the problem is with the drive.
 
Sorry, I don't understand. Please could you explain a little more.

I'm using legit red-book audio CDs.

I've just ran that Nero program on my desktop and the surface scan reported "good". I couldn't run the C1/C2 error checks because my "drive does not support this function", but I imagine there wouldn't have been many erros. However, on my laptop drive there were predictably a ton of errors.
 
Try ripping with EAC.

I've found my PC is much less tolerant of scratches etc than my dedicated CD player (which presumably has some sort of error correction / smoothing). I have one in particular that makes a tapping noise when played on the computer. It almost sounds like it's part of the recording.
 
It's the drive. I bought a 'laptop drive > usb' adapter. An old drive worked fine when plugged to my laptop and desktop, whereas the Dell drive had the same issue when I plugged it into the desktop and laptop via USB.

I may as well get it replaced once more, but if the problem reoccurs, I think that whole model is affected.
 
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