# [SOLVED] Razer Blackwidow Chroma headphone jack sometimes dropping sound



## darksteel88 (Jul 10, 2008)

So I just got a new Chroma today and noticed at some point that the headphone jack has a very strange playback issue.

The 3.5mm headphone jack is connected to the back of my computer, then my headphones to the keyboard. For the most part, the headphone jack works and I can hear audio just fine. However, sometimes I seem to drop audio for a short period.

I think the best way for me to explain it is to go through the example. Below is a song on YouTube, and I've timestamped it. At 3:14 when the singer finishes his line, I lose audio from the song. There's supposed to be a breakdown right there, but I just don't hear any of it. I hear the drum ring out briefly and quietly and that's it. The audio resumes as normal at 3:22.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TNckXgfYhA#t=190 (I apologize for the song but it is the best example).

This issue is 100% reproducible. It has happened every single time I have listened to this song, regardless of whether it was from YouTube or from iTunes. It does have to be the exact same audio track though (so live versions don't have this issue, at least on this song). It is not limited to this song, but this one had a full 8 seconds of audio I lost, where others had only half a second dropped. It does not happen in every song as far as I can tell, and it's not that frequent either. I only noticed it after a few hours of using it, and only because I knew there was supposed to be something at that point in the song.

When the audio from the song drops, I do not lose audio completely. I can still here audio from other sources on my computer.

For a sanity check, I did testing with the ports and headphones. With my headphones plugged into my Chroma, with the keyboard plugged into the back audio jack, it reproduced this issue. With the keyboard plugged into the front audio jack, still reproduced. With a different pear of headphones, issue still reproduced in both cases. With either headphone plugged directly into either audio jack on my computer, I do not observe the issue.

Does anyone have any idea? Should I maybe exchange it or something? I have no clue why this would happen, it really doesn't make any sense to me.


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## darksteel88 (Jul 10, 2008)

*Re: Razer Blackwidow Chroma headphone jack sometimes dropping sound*

I went and did some further testing. I got a guitar pro tab of the song (which is basically a sheet music version that loads into some software, so it will play the sheet music). At some point X in the song, I lose all the audio from one of the guitars. It is not related to the frequency of the guitar because a section of the audio I lose is played earlier in the song, and at that time it's played fine. I can confirm that in this scenario, I lost audio for the guitar for the entire rest of the song. If I start playback somewhere after point X, I still don't get any audio from the guitar.


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## darksteel88 (Jul 10, 2008)

I seem to have found the root cause. The issue is that there's a problem with the left audio signal. Whenever I play anything at 100% from the left signal, I don't hear anything. If I play it with less of a pan to the left signal (so that something is still coming out of the right signal), then I still hear it. I also found that at pans that were right adjusted, the sound was considerably louder.

I'm no expert but my guess is that the voltage doesn't get applied properly to the left channel. I want to say that there's actually no voltage applied and that the right side is doing some sort of compensation, but I wouldn't know. 

At any rate, I can go back tomorrow and exchange it and all will be well.


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