Sudden hiss

[hapz]

Maybe sombody experienced this and can help.

I suddenly have a loud background hissing noise which appears as soon as Windows loads. The noise appears together with all the other expected sounds. Initially I suspected a driver, but that noise is under all my OSs, so I concluded that it must be a hardware problem.

But which part is it? The sound card or most likely something else?

It might be time to switch to a Santa Cruz, but they are not cheap, and if I can avoid the expense....

[Brian Ellis]

Harald,

You don't say what the card is. Some cheap sound cards are inherently hissy when the wick is turned up high. However, the first thing to do is to mute all the channels you are not using, especially the microphone one. Some on-m/b sound systems are particularly susceptible to picking up noise from neighbouring components. The m/b on the computer I'm typing this on is a case in point and I had to disable the sound system on it and put in a SB128 PCI card which works perfectly. I had the same problem on a Compaq notebook, which was so noisy that it was impossible to use it for speech recognition.

[hapz]

Thanks for your input Brian.

Believe me, I fooled around with all the settings I could find in trying to pinpoint the source of the problem. That's why I tried also different operating systems, usually a good way to discern between software and hardware related issues.

Well, i am happy to report that the problem is gone since i gave the PC a rest and a cold boot this morning. Strange, indeed.

The reason I did not mention the make of the sound card, its a dirty word in this forum But I tried to get help from Creative too. So far no answer.

[Brian Ellis]

Harald

There is no such thing as a dirty word. Many people, myself included, use the SB L..e!, with no problems. It is an excellent sound card, despite what some say, and works very well for video work, at least on many computers.

[Sciascia]

HEY MY KID'S IN THE ROOM, WATCH THE LANGUAGE....

[Indiana]

Well, the SBLive as any newer creative soundcard has bad and bloated drivers. Problems with these are mostly seen in Win2k and WinXP systems, not in Win98/ME. I had some occasional hiss and/or stutter with my SBLive in Win2k only (Win98SE worked fine) on three motherboards, one being Intel BX based (which I'm sure everyone would agree here is NOT the culprit) the others having VIA chipsets. Direct AC3-throughput wouldn't work and you can be quite sure to have more framedrops than the average user of e.g. a TurtleBeach soundcard - when capturing full-res (with half or even quarter res caps it's not really hard to have 0 drops).
With the SBLive in Win2k, I even got occassional stutters when simply playing back mp3s and browsing the net at once - which should NOT be a hard task as my 50MHz Amiga can do it flawlessly as can do my PC, now that I ditched the SBLive Platinum...

[Sciascia]

I bought an Audigy a couple of months ago and couldn't capture 30 secs without drops! That was on a 1.4G AMD, 512M Ram, an 80G RAID0 ultra100 array and no programs or anything in the background. I slapped my old Diamond MX300 that I have been trying to replace for quite sometime back in there and no drops in 30 minutes. If that is not a SC issue than I don't know what is. Even if I could tweak it a little and get a little better performance, it really put me off even more from Creative. I also felt compelled to do a reformat after I removed it form bad experiences with Creative products in the past. They leave so much residual crap in there after an uninstall that it seems to effect everything even when its no longer in your system.

[Baerchen]

I've just been converted to being a SantaCruz user and therefore I couldn't resist giving my 2 cents here ..

I had hiss and crackles with the SB Live 5.1 too, then turned to SantaCruz and everything was fine .. I can also confirm that with the SantaCruz, one might experience less dropped frames: I have 3 in 2 hours of capturing, as opposed to almost 70 with the SB Live. 3 is not 0, but I'm working on it ... ;-)

Thumbs up for that card, I'll stay off Creative for the rest of my (computer-) live. Maybe Brian had just luck with his configuration?

Baerchen

[Brian Ellis]

Baerchen

Not just me! There are hundreds of SB Live! users who have no problems with video editing (or voice recognition, another critical app). I believe that the problem is not inherent in the card or its drivers, but how the m/b handles the PCI bus. I have read a report in a mag (a year or so ago) where they did a direct comparison between SB Live! and SCTB and the tester's measurements found virtually no difference between their use of the PCI bus on the particular computer he was using. I believe the problem may be more fundamental than the simple use of the bus but is possibly related to the crosstalk between the lines on the bus or between a track on the bus and a totally unrelated track, a critical motherboard design factor, as any engineer in the business can tell you. If this hypothesis (and it is only a hypothesis) is correct, then it probably means that SB Live! is critically sensitive to the parasite signal, which could cause it to flip the state of a bit, producing unwanted noise. If this is so, then there are faults by both the designers of the sound board and the motherboard, which interact together: AND it explains why some can use it without problems and some cannot.

BTW, I did a 48 minute capture the day before yesterday, using AVI_IO, at 704 x 576 hardware MJPEG on max quality with just one drop, right at the start of the capture, no pops, crackles or hisses (other than those on the source material!), so Live! isn't all that bad. And this was on a m/b that is archaic (PIII/450 with 384 Mb).

[Baerchen]

Completely right from your point of view. But I imagine two cases (and both assume there are no performance issues with the Turtle Beach (and afaik, there aren't - I've searched the net up and down ;-))

1. User has no soundcard. What would you recommend? Of course, one would say "Try a TB - depending on your other hardware, a SB Live could possibly cause trouble".

2. User has probs with existing soundcard due to cracks and hiss in his capture. Again, you would recommend a TB, since changing the motherboard till you found one that works might be too expensive.

The issue just is, that there _can_ be problems when using a SBLive. But to a certain point of security there aren't problems with a TB (with problems I refer only to cracks and hiss and such, not drivers or other issues).
In other words, there is no reason recommending a SBLive over a TB. Right ?

[Brian Ellis]

My little bear,

Right...up to a point or two! One point is that TB has a non-linear spectral emphasis, giving it a "brilliant" sound. Now, I know that a PC is never to be considered as a hi-fi system, but I do object to hardware unnecessarily modifying the sound quality in order to achieve a subjective effect to impress the cloth-ears. A second point may no longer be valid, but it certainly was a few months ago: the functionality of TB was severely restricted in anything higher than W98SE. A third point is that Live! offers a much wider choice of i/o ports, I believe (not the lite versions of Live!, though).

[Baerchen]

First off, 10 points for finding out what Baerchen means ... ;-)

Hey hey ... we're going off-topic, don't we? Anyway, I was just talking about recommendations to users experiencing crackles. Here, the TB is superior to the SBL, when it comes to compatibility (caused by Creative and/or others). We're now starting to enumerate all pro's and con's .. should we do that ? Could end up in something we don't want ;-)

Let's put it that way .. both are good soundcards for their purposes and we're both happy with our systems :-)

But still .. *g*

Baerchen

[Brian Ellis]

Didn't really take much finding out -- I lived in Switzerland for 35 years, albeit in the Welsch area, where we consider Schwyzertütsch to be a throat disease!