- Sep 16, 2009
- 4
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- 18,510
Greetings Tom's Hardware 
I have a problem with my sound card that I hope you can help me with. My sound card is a Creative X-Fi Xtremegamer and I'm using the associated Creative Console program. When I set the program to "headphone mode" I can hear crosstalk through my headphones in the form of a low buzz when my computer is doing certain things (for example, I can hear it when I scroll through a webpage). I could live with it except that running games produces a constant stream of it, and it becomes quite loud and annoying.
At first I thought that the interference was occurring in the cable that connects my front panel audio connectors to my sound card, so I plugged my headphones into the headphone port on my speakers. This worked all right if I kept the sound card in "speaker mode", I couldn't hear any cross talk at normal listening volume. But this mode distorted the EAX effects in games, so I switched the card to "headphone mode" with the headphones connected through the speakers. Once I turned up the volume enough to hear sounds normally, I could hear the crosstalk again.
Since my speakers are connected to the back of the card, I now know that the interference is at the sound card itself and not the front panel cable. My question is, can I do anything about it? I've tried moving the sound card to a PCI slot further away from my graphics card / other hardware, but it doesn't seem to have had any effect. Do you think that putting some shielding around the card would help? Or is it possible the interference is coming through the PCI connection?
Sorry for the long story, and thanks for any help
I have a problem with my sound card that I hope you can help me with. My sound card is a Creative X-Fi Xtremegamer and I'm using the associated Creative Console program. When I set the program to "headphone mode" I can hear crosstalk through my headphones in the form of a low buzz when my computer is doing certain things (for example, I can hear it when I scroll through a webpage). I could live with it except that running games produces a constant stream of it, and it becomes quite loud and annoying.
At first I thought that the interference was occurring in the cable that connects my front panel audio connectors to my sound card, so I plugged my headphones into the headphone port on my speakers. This worked all right if I kept the sound card in "speaker mode", I couldn't hear any cross talk at normal listening volume. But this mode distorted the EAX effects in games, so I switched the card to "headphone mode" with the headphones connected through the speakers. Once I turned up the volume enough to hear sounds normally, I could hear the crosstalk again.
Since my speakers are connected to the back of the card, I now know that the interference is at the sound card itself and not the front panel cable. My question is, can I do anything about it? I've tried moving the sound card to a PCI slot further away from my graphics card / other hardware, but it doesn't seem to have had any effect. Do you think that putting some shielding around the card would help? Or is it possible the interference is coming through the PCI connection?
Sorry for the long story, and thanks for any help
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