[breez]

I have an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800Pro card and it has a TV-tuner onboard. Normally an audio cable is connected between it and the sound card and the output is quite noisy. While watching TV it didn't bother and I could just mute the input when not watching TV.

Yesterday I noticed that the same noises can be heard even when the cable is not connected at all! I didn't notice it with the former Chaintech, but then again it did go unnoticed for several days with my new EMU card (and I moved to a speaker rig just recently). If I turn my speaker amp to max, it's easy to hear, but with normal levels it's very faint and is usually drowned in background noise in my house (ear directly to speaker reveals it though). Muting the EMU inputs doesn't help. The noises happen when scrolling webpage, moving mouse etc. anything screen related.

So does anyone have ideas how to get rid of these noises? Other than ditching the ATI card

My father thought it is possible that the AIW card is polluting the power lines of the computer. Do the analog stage components on the EMU card have regulated supply or just straight +5V from ATX supply?

This is a little embarrassing, me being a PC audio proponent thinking that the concept of "noisy pc box" is no problem and a thing of the past with modern tech

Also I have another noise matter. In RMAA graphs I can see small spikes at 33Hz and its harmonics. It's very low level, just above the noise level of the EMU card. Not a real problem, but I'm curious to what component produces 33Hz in a PC

 

[BrokenEnglish]

what mobo-/cpu combination are you using... (i bet it is an athlon system...

)? check the irq-bindings in your device manager: the e-mu and the aiw should not share an irq. the easy way to achieve this, is to try to rearrange the card to a different pci-slot. good luck!

 

[breez]

Abit NF7-S 2.0
Athlon XP 1800+ @ 2GHz

The sound card doesn't share IRQ with the video card. I tried changing PCI slots the minute I noticed the noise (it was in the last slot anyway).

I found some info with google and the exact symptom was described as "blitter noise" which is noise generated by the 2D acceleration functions of the video card. It was also mentioned that in "poor audio circuits" the noise may leak into the audio output. EMU, a poor audio circuit?

I should try with another video card, but it doesn't really solve the problem.