Hey there. I am listening to music through a PC with a SoundMAX chip on the NVidia graphics card. I'm getting heaps of noise - like weird clicking and distortions when I mouse-down or swop applications. Am thinking about buying a BitHead. Would it fix these kinds of problems or is it something else? Anyone have any clues?
The problem is that you're getting noise on the line-out of your soundcard. This is caused by EMI (electromagnetic interference) on your microphone-in and line-in inputs that is being amplified by the soundcard and sent through the line-out. Muting EVERY input on the soundcard will fix this problem. If you still have trouble, pick up a Chaintech AV-710 soundcard for $23.50. This will not only fix your EMI problems, but get you dramatically better sound quality. Hell, just buy a AV-710 no matter what, the improvement is worth it.
Definitely interference from the rest of your system.
As suggested, mute every device in your system's volume control except for Master and Wave, and MIDI if you use it. In my experience, Mic is the worst offender by far when it comes to nasty interference, so defintely mute that input unless you're actually using it.
If the SoundMAX has an amp-out, don't use it. Some older sound cards, like the AWE64, have built in amplifiers. They sound awful. Just use the sound chip's line-out if that's the case.
If you're using the headphone jack on a set of speakers, try hooking your headphones directly into the line-out jack of the sound chip. Cheapy speakers have pretty lousy headphone output, and add quite a bit of noise and interference on top of the onboard sound's less-than pristine output.
Finally, jump onto Newegg and pick up a Chaintech AV-710. Or something higher-end, if you're so inclined. Almost any true sound card will sound way better than any on-board sound chip.
Well I had all those things turned down and muted. Headphones are coming out of the headphone jack, although I tried the line out and it was the same. It's very weird, the noise seems to come in response to things like moving a window around on the monitor or, resizing a window etc...
I can't upgrade the soundcard as it's a machine in a computer graphics lab ie not mine. THought about an external solution such as a BitHead but don't want to splash the cash to find that ít doesn;t solve the problem...
BH should solve your noise problem. The noise you spoke of can caused by many things, but mainly your soundcard is picking up and amplifying the various noises of your computer system (say moving a mouse, openning new window = page swapping = noise from hard drive). When an external soundcard is used, your computer will send bit streams to your BH. As long as the bit stream is not affected by the various noises (trust me, they won't), you should be fine.
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