Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Sound problems

(1/4) > >>

oblivion:
I have a problem, and I'm not sure how to fix it.

My desktop PC isn't exactly new -- just over 4 years old, AMD Athlon 64 2.2GHz 3500+ cpu, not exactly storming but okay, 4Gb RAM, running Vista.

The hard disk it came with was 160Gb and, armed with an Amazon voucher I got for my birthday back in February, I replaced it with a WD Green 1Tb drive.

I THINK that might be where things started going wrong. It's a big drive, but it's not the fastest.

Nothing I do sound-wise that involves any sort of processing at all (eg games, playing MP3s) plays the sound smoothly. My netbook (Win7 Starter, 1.6GHz cpu half the RAM) plays everything fine, in comparison.

I've done everything I can think of. I checked the drive was UDMA, I've tweaked all the caches I could find, no difference.

I've even disabled the onboard audio and installed a (admittedly oldish) sound card, to take some of the load off the CPU. Things improved slightly, but only slightly, and the improvement might even be in my imagination.

So... any suggestions? If I upgrade the soundcard to something vaguely respectable (maybe something by Creative, not too expensive but not dirt cheap) might that help? Do the external USB audio processors do a similar job to PCI, or do I need PCI with dedicated hardware to make the difference? Or am I wasting my time and I should either replace the hard disk with something faster (maybe put the original back with the terabyte drive as a secondary unit), or bite the bullet and ditch Vista, or...

Any and all suggestions welcome!

mouser:
Playing an mp3 file puts almost no load on the hard disk or cpu.

There is absolutely no reason that you should have any trouble whatsoever playing an mp3 file on that computer with that hard disk, with built in sound on your motherboard or a sound card.

So don't even *think* about upgrading any hardware.


So that still leaves the question about what is going wrong for you.

I think it would help to just pick one test case and focus on that.  So take playing an mp3 file, using windows media player.

When you say it doesn't play the sound smoothly, what exactly do you mean?

Renegade:
Make sure to have the correct drivers and update them.

A while back I had encountered some issues with a sound card driver that caused bad audio.

Just one thing to look at. Not sure if it will help in your case...

40hz:
It sounds like something is maxing out your CPU, or excessively polling an interrupt, whenever you try to play MP3s. Switching to a separate audio card (which took some of the load off the CPU) and getting a slight improvement seems to reinforce that suspicion. This points to a driver issue, as Renegade mentioned earlier

There's a few things that could be at play here.

1. Audio Drivers

Audio drivers are the most likely suspect. There's the possibility that a driver has somehow been updated or changed (without your knowledge) which is causing the problem. A lot of Athlon-based boards use RealTek audio chips and drivers, which can act very flaky. These same mobos also often use the NVidia nForce drivers, which are known to sometimes conflict with the RealTek audio susbsystem. I've seen situations where adding a component forced a change to the nForce drivers, which in turn caused a problem downstream.

Use Device Manager to see if the audio driver has been updated and if there's an older RealTek driver available. If there is, do a roll-back and see if the problem goes away. If that doesn't help, check your PC's manufacturer's website and see if there are updated audio drivers available. If there are, download the most current set available for your model and and try reinstalling them.

2. BIOS

Check and see if there's a BIOS update available from your PC manufacturer. Sometimes older boards have trouble dealing with today's larger/faster hardware, which results in high CPU usage and erratic performance. A BIOS update will often fix that. Two points regarding BIOS updates:


* Only use a BIOS update supplied by the manufacturer of your PC. DO NOT use any other BIOS updates, such as might be available from the maker of your actual motherboard, even if you know who the maker is.
  
* Follow the instructions that come with the software exactly. And under no circumstance ever try to stop the update process once it begins. If it's interrupted before it finishes (or you otherwise screw up your BIOS update) you could be left with a completely inoperable machine that can't be repaired without major hassles. Flashing the BIOS is not a difficult thing to do. But this is one of those very few times when things have to be done in a very specific order and fashion.
3. Chipset Drivers (or "board" drivers)

Depending on what hardware is in you machine, you might be experiencing a chipset issue. Diagnosing that can get a little hairy so it would be helpful to know the manufacturer of your PC and what chipset is being used. Piriform's Speccy (or any one of a dozen other freeware sysinfo utilities) can provide that information if it's not listed in the documentation that came with your machine.

Let us know how you make out. :Thmbsup:

mouser:
a first step might be to bring up task manager and see if any application is using up your cpu.. or install a program like my Process Tamer to detect high cpu processes and reduce their cpu use.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page