# Sound skipping, scratchy, and distorted - have tried different cards and onboard



## Daedalus (Jan 28, 2007)

Yeah, I'm new to the forums. I've been looking for an online support center like this for months. It seems that SoundBlaster's support is ****.

Anyway, this is one of the strangest problems I've EVER had.

Basically, my sound performance is like this topic's title. The sound works fine when playing MP3's and other sounds. However, whenever I play a graphics-intensive game, such as Call of Duty 2 or Oblivion, the sound skips (Oblivion) or is scratchy (COD2).

Understand, I've tried MANY things. Initially, I had a SoundBlaster Audigy SE. I tried updating the drivers. I tried rolling back the drivers. That didn't work. I tried moving it between 3 different PCI slots to change the IRQ. That didn't work. I even tried disabling ACPI. That CERTAINLY didn't work. The speakers AREN'T my problem. I already tried a different set of speakers that I know works well, and I had the same results. I used to have a SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 card before, and figured that the sound might be bad because the card is old and the drivers aren't suited to XP. Buying the Audigy SE solved NOTHING.

I even tried reformatting and reinstalling Windows.

Recently, I took the sound card out and used my Realtek AC97 onboard audio. 

...Guess what? No improvement whatsoever.


Any suggestions at all? I'm ripping my hair out. This has been driving me crazy for months.

Oh yeah, and my specs:

Asus A8V Motherboard
AMD Athlon 3200+ 64-bit Processor
2 GB DDR RAM
Radeon 9600 PRO 256 MB Graphics Card
Realtek AC97 (Onboard) Audio


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## Daedalus (Jan 28, 2007)

On a side note, simply restarting my computer after the initial startup gets rid of some of the distortion, but only in some programs, and it only lasts until I shut the computer down again.


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## Daedalus (Jan 28, 2007)

I also have a 300W Austin Power Supply, if that's any help. But I suspect that if it were some electrical lack that caused my problems, I'd be having difficulties with more devices than just my sound.


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## ecc83 (Oct 7, 2006)

I know jack but I read a lot and remember things: IRQ conflict? Does you mbd have on board graphic? If so, pull the Gcard and run with o/b. I know it won't look good! Update codecs.
Rock on 
Dave


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## dai (Jul 2, 2004)

300w psu's date back to windows 98 era,you would expect to see a quality 550w running your system
put your spec's into here 
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp
based on a quality supply and add 30% to the end result and that's the minimum you require
have a read here
http://www.techsupportforum.com/showthread.php?t=107466


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## SamwiseVT (Jan 16, 2008)

Has anyone had any luck fixing this? Because I am actually having the exact same problem, and have no idea how to repair it!


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## Daedalus (Jan 28, 2007)

Wow... old topic. Things have changed for me. I've reformatted since then, and I have a different version of XP (the one with SP2), as well as a 600W power supply, new graphics card, and more RAM. I still have the same sound card, and things seem to have improved. I have no distorted or scratchy sound; however, there is a strange game-specific problem that occurs whenever I play COD2. The sound there is scratchy and, strangely enough, restarting once fixes the problem until I shut the computer down again. So sorry if I can't shed any light on your problem, but the one thing I recommend is changing the IRQ of your sound card, which I never did.


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