So yesterday, happy with my wonderful new sound card, myself and a friend tried recording a video for youtube funs.
Unfortunately we had a lot of issues with microphone quality on the soundcard which prevented this. It turns out, using the Soundblaster Z is great for sound but not for microphone input... The problem was, the second I went in to a game there was a considerable amount of noise on the line, enough to make it impossible to hear anything in subsequent videos, and to make it very difficult for my friend to understand what I was saying.
We attempted to use 3 different microphones. The Soundblaster Z 'beam forming' microphone, my headset microphone, and a usb webcam. The webcam had no issues with static at all and worked fine but the quality on it was always pants so not worth using. The others both had the same issue.
After a lot of googling this appeared to be a well known problem, and someone suggested updated drivers from PAX which didnt help.
After much thought on the matter I have come to realise the issue could be its proximity to my graphics card, as the problem gets worse the longer I am in a game, especially a graphically intensive one, so its reasonable a graphics card related issue could be happening, like EMI.
I am however unable to text this until I get home in 8 hours time, but am wondering if other people have had similar issues and what their solutions were? Its annoying as I paid more for the SBZ specially because it had a microphone and EMI shield which I thought would protect it from this issue and give a better microphone quality then my headset!
Unfortunately we had a lot of issues with microphone quality on the soundcard which prevented this. It turns out, using the Soundblaster Z is great for sound but not for microphone input... The problem was, the second I went in to a game there was a considerable amount of noise on the line, enough to make it impossible to hear anything in subsequent videos, and to make it very difficult for my friend to understand what I was saying.
We attempted to use 3 different microphones. The Soundblaster Z 'beam forming' microphone, my headset microphone, and a usb webcam. The webcam had no issues with static at all and worked fine but the quality on it was always pants so not worth using. The others both had the same issue.
After a lot of googling this appeared to be a well known problem, and someone suggested updated drivers from PAX which didnt help.
After much thought on the matter I have come to realise the issue could be its proximity to my graphics card, as the problem gets worse the longer I am in a game, especially a graphically intensive one, so its reasonable a graphics card related issue could be happening, like EMI.
I am however unable to text this until I get home in 8 hours time, but am wondering if other people have had similar issues and what their solutions were? Its annoying as I paid more for the SBZ specially because it had a microphone and EMI shield which I thought would protect it from this issue and give a better microphone quality then my headset!
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