Installed sound card- now sound distorts?

vitamin_joe

I installed a sound card, one that has worked fine before on this computer. Now the sound distorts at a certain volume, especially vocals. What should I do?

TonyMMM

Have you installed the latest drivers for the card ?

vitamin_joe

I installed the driver previously when the card was first installed. I've had the card in another machine for a while, and now put it back into this one. I've not noticed the distortion before.

Nilrem

Have you checked the output with other speakers and a different playback software?

I was having trouble with sound distortion on one of our machines when watching videos, after a bit of faffing about I found out it was due to the output level on the playback software (VLC lets you set the sound at up to 200% of it's normal level - before it's sent to the soundcard).

So things to try would be.
Check the drivers are up to date.
Check with another audio programme if you've not done so already.
Check any special effects, and things like bass/treble adjustments the sound card might have as options are set to default.
Check with a different set of speakers or earphones (and make sure they are plugged in fully - I've had soundcard/speaker combos where the jack has been pushed in tight, but on closer inspection needed quite a bit of extra force to get it in fully).
Check for any secondary/tertiary settings on your sound card - I've lost track of the number of times I've been asked to fix sound issues for friends/family and it turns out that there are 2-4 different places where a setting needs to be checked or unchecked because the different parts of the driver/programmes don't talk to each other, things like Mic boost where the Windows sound control panel usually has an option, as does the cards driver/apps package, and then a game or other app that is being used might again have one, and is they aren't all ticked it might not apply it (I've got an ongoing, an apparently fairly common issue with my soundcard never remembering the mic boost setting when I log in/turn the machine on:p).

vitamin_joe

Thanks for the reply. I've checked the ones that I can- will test with different speakers tomorrow.

Quick question- do you think having limited disk space might affect it? I've got almost no space left on my hard drive- 5.36 GB.