[Scgeeks] Re: Audio problem DAMMIT

[Indigo]

"Indigo" <nobody at spamcop.net> wrote in message 
news:g7t7i4$pps$1 at news.spamcop.net...
> Thanks for the tip, but I decided to just go mono, I built a test cable 
> and sound still comes out of both stereo speakers, so I'm fine with that. 
> Just need to finish resoldering all the connections,

I must have been imagining things when I heard stereo sound with my test 
cable. I finally finished up the harness, plugged it in, and much to my 
dismay there was no noise -- not even the "huuummmm" the ungrounded 
incorrectly wired harness made. Much confusion, so I plugged the input end 
3.5 mm jack into my pocket TV headphone output and voila! Sounds emanating 
from the stereo downstairs! Damn, I guess those line losses _are_ too much?!

So I plug the jack into the headphone output on my PC, and again, hear 
noises from the stereo, but the PC speakers go silent (you can only use one 
or the other, like my TV audio outputs work). Well, ok, I guess I can live 
with that....so I unplug the headphone input...but I start hearing crackling 
noises (again) in the audio. So I look behind the box and discover that in 
during my lazy "blindly hunt and search" for the main speaker output jack I 
had accidentally plugged the 3.5 mm splitter into the surround sound output. 
No wonder the speaker output from the PC sounded weird, it was coming from 
the built in PC speakers, not the powered set, and with no surround sound 
source of course the rear speaker output was zero! ;-) So I plug the 
splitter into the correct "front" speaker output, hook up the cable to the 
downstairs stereo again, and voila! Sound! But only from one channel, which 
is ok, that's all I really needed.

But it's still crackling, especially the XM streaming audio, like REAL bad. 
As an aside, I recently bought David Gilmour's "Live at the Royal Albert 
Hall" DVD, and had tried ripping the audio and copying the video (no go on 
the vid copy, it's copy protected of course). So I'm trying every single A/V 
piece of freeware/shareware/built-in software trying to figger out how to at 
least rip the audio, and I discover that two of the pieces of software that 
came with the PC (Roxio stuff) will not run. So after about 1/2 hour I 
finally figure out how to break into the D:\ original image partition to get 
to the .msi files for those two apps, and "repair" them. Frigging Roxio DVD 
Creator took nearly an hour to reinstall! Thinking that those or some other 
freeware A/V apps may have corrupted other files, I also reinstalled the 
SoundMax audio drivers (didn't bother to uninstall anything first) and 
rebooted.

Now, with fingers crossed, I may have everything working properly, FINALLY. 
Currently listening to streaming audio, no crackles or stuttering so far 
(it's been about 1/2 hour now), and I've gone thru some CPU intensive 
periods during that time (AVG 8 auto-update), times that used to cause 
severe stuttering from the sound card.

I don't pretend to understand any of this (like how it happened or what 
fixed what), but by trial and error it looks like I got it fixed. I was 
worried that 1) my ancient powered speakers needed replacing, or 2) the 
sound card on my < 1 yr old PC was bad, but it appears not (fingers triple 
crossed! ;-)