Distorted Sounds...

Sweetchuck

I usually don't have the master volume any higher than 50% anyway - I've checked and this is still the case. The fact that the sound is skipping and not simply being distorted would also suggest that the volume isn't a factor.

intel

Sorry to ask this but..

Is only playing CDs or Online radio aswell?

If CDs only it could be a duff CDrom drive or If online aswell maybe a duff soundcard.

wolfman

Ah, ok. I've seen about this too. I read one person used Winamp, then in the settings under output, for direct sound output he increased the buffer to 5000ms or so. Can't think of anything else to do. Fact of the matter is onbaord sound is quite poor. I've put an old Sounblaster Live in my machine as I was having distortion problems with my C-Media onboard sound.

Sweetchuck

intel wrote:

Sorry to ask this but..

Is only playing CDs or Online radio aswell?

If CDs only it could be a duff CDrom drive or If online aswell maybe a duff soundcard.

No, like I said earlier it's happening with all audio files - streaming radio, MP3 CDs, MP3s on my HDD - everything, basically.

wolfman wrote:

Ah, ok. I've seen about this too. I read one person used Winamp, then in the settings under output, for direct sound output he increased the buffer to 5000ms or so. Can't think of anything else to do. Fact of the matter is onbaord sound is quite poor. I've put an old Sounblaster Live in my machine as I was having distortion problems with my C-Media onboard sound.

I know that onboard sound is poor, but like I say, it's a work PC so I can't really demand an audio upgrade. And whilst onboard sound may well be poor, there's no reason why it should be incapable of playing jitter-free MP3s when Outlook and Word are running at the same time.

intel

How much RAM has the PC got?

Sweetchuck

504MB (see initial post for basic spec).

intel

Sweetchuck wrote:

504MB (see initial post for basic spec).

Oh yeah sorry... anyway thats OK so its the onboard sound or soundcard thats up the creek.. Unless you have any missing codecs or corrupt ones.

Get WMP10 and download and install if you can regardless whether its been done before also update any drivers if you can (admin rights)

If you cant do any of the above you may be stuck but I would say onboard sound or soundcard is duff...........

HTH

drlight_2

Does task manager diplay processor peaking, & does the hdd led on the case stay lit up showing busy disk activity,

sound stops & skips when the disk is busy, and will distort if the processor processing above maximum.
If they are both ok then it's the hardware, could be a pci card not allowing the sound processor to request processing.
You can put sound card in.