OK. I feel like crying now.

Tommy B · 19 Jul 2007 at 10:48

I recently bought my laptop (see sig) and one of the main uses of my PC is listening to music.

The fact is there is horrible static interference with the built-in headphone out jack, and so I purchased an Aureon 5.1 USB External sound card. I get exactly the same thing with that too. It's not a hardware problem, simply touching the USB plug against the USB socket causes the static to feedback. It goes absolutely bezerk whenever the CPU is at work or the HDs.

Is there any way to prevent this, or am I going to have to return this laptop?

If no one here can help can anybody point me to another forum where people might be able to?

CHeers

Tommy B · 19 Jul 2007 at 11:35

It's definitely something to do with the power supply. When run on battery, the noise completely vanishes :confused:

Tommy B · 19 Jul 2007 at 11:46

OK WHAT THE HELL. It's a good job I didn't do electronics and I'll give a cookie to anyone who can explain this.

It turns out it was the DVD player connected to the amp the other side of the room which was causing the problem. How strange! Yet it seemed directly linked to the power supply of the laptop. As soon as I unplugged the phono cables between the amp and the DVD player, this hiss vanished. Oddly, even unplugging the DVD from the mains didn't solve the problem, ONLY removing the phono cables between each device would solve it. Really, really strange :confused:

At least it's fixed now. The sound quality from the Aureon is absolutely top notch!

Tommy B · 19 Jul 2007 at 15:09

YoungBlood said:
I have adsactly the same problem with my onboard sound. Not a laptop though a case system. You can hear the harddrives accessing and everything through the headphones, very very annoying.
Switching to a PCI soundcard solves the problem though, but I only have one and wanted to use that for the TV card
Bit of a pointless post realy, just wish mine was so simple to solve, I think it's just down to realy bad onboard sound card. (A97)

I still think my problem was extremely strange. Almost funny in a way. Simply removing a phono cable from the back of my dvd player seemed to fix everything. What's weird, is even though I've concluded it wasn't anything to do with the laptop itself, the noise did increase when the CPU was under strain.

I'm guessing the laptop was somehow earthing a signal all the way to the amp, through the amp circuit, and to the dvd player. I'd love it if an electrician on here could explain it to me though.