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Topic: Odd intermittent warbling sound (Read 2966 times) previous topic - next topic
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Odd intermittent warbling sound

hi chaps,

i've got some dirt cheap creative speakers (5.1, P580 i think), connected up to an onboard soundcard (AC97, on an NF4 board), and for a while now i've been getting an odd warbling sound from the speakers. it only happens very rarely, and is definitely not easily reproducible. sometimes it'll happen when playing a game, sometimes when i play music, sometimes just after a while of having the computer on doing nothing, so i don't believe any piece of software is the cause.

it's not a buzzing sound, or even a single tone... the best way i could describe it is: you know when you tune in an AM radio? most of the times it's just static, but sometimes you get a weird changing pitch. well, it's like that (the pitch changing bit), only faster, and constant. it's very quiet, too, but noticeable enough to annoy me. the other thing is that it's the same volume, no matter what volume i have the speakers- which suggests to me it's not some sound that's getting amplified somewhere, it's most likely the speakers themselves, or the cable from the woofer to them.

anyways, have any of you heard of this kind of thing before? or do you know what might be causing it? i know i have some pretty cheap equipment, but as i say, it sounds like it's happening in the speakers themselves, or something like that. could electrical/magnetic interference be the cause?

thanks for reading my post

hymerman

Odd intermittent warbling sound

Reply #1 –
Now that you mention radio, my old speaker set (cambridge pcworks 2.1) catched an FM station, during the day it was barely noticeable and less noticeable when playing back music, but during the night when everything was quiet it was quite annoying.

The problem solved when I moved the speakers to another place, some people suggested me to fold the cables with aluminum. Never tried it thou.

Odd intermittent warbling sound

Reply #2 –
I had a huge intermittent sub-woofer hum on my Win98 system years ago. My solution was keeping the speaker wires from touching other wires e.g.; monitor cable, power cord, cable/dsl/phone line, etc., they don't have to be far apart so long as they're not touching one another. Also make sure that all your computer equipment (all of it) is plugged into a grounded source.

Odd intermittent warbling sound

Reply #3 –
ah, how annoying. i've spent ages tidying the cables so they're all running parallel and whatnot. well, i'll try that sometime soon anyway, thanks for the advice chaps