On 22/03/11 20:31, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 08:27:48PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Neither is it going to have any effect at all while the sound is digital, the noise can only affect things once it's back to analogue surely. (OK, in extreme cases it could, but it's unlikely)
Oh yeh if you run a digital signal out to an offboard DAC then most of your problems go away....that would be the best way.
But as soon as you use an analogue output from an internal card everything after the DAC on the soundcard is going to suffer.
Oh and another quick tip that can make a huge difference. If you have a machine with integrated audio based on the old AC97 headphone jack standard (rather than the newer HDaudio standard) and you have front mounted headphone/mic sockets. Then a free upgrade is to get those front sockets disconnected and jumper out the AC97 header (as if you had no front sockets as described in your mainboard manual)
Otherwise all your audio (to the rear socket) is routed up to the front jack, through the contacts, back down to the mainboard and then out again via the rear socket. All done generally on nasty screened cable strung across the inside that faraday cage of EMI.
I did that to my home machine and even on (admittedly better than average) PC speakers the difference was immediately obvious.
HDaudio fixes this as the soundcard detects the presence of headphones or whatever electrically and switches outputs, AC97 style relies on contacts in the headphone jack opening when you plug something in, a quick test therefore is to plug an empty 3.5mm to 1/4" adaptor in and if you lose output to the rear audio then you need to be running the lobotomy pronto.