New to this forum, so hopefully someone can help with this very annoying problem.

I have a 3 year old HP laptop. In the last several months, something changed so that it seems that when audio is coming from the sound card and the harddrive is engaged, I get quite a bit of static. You can see the hard drive light and the static usually cooresponds quite closely.

It is not tied to any particular program. You hear it when the Windows welcome sound comes on and the system is booting, and it is most prominent when I am listening to music on iTunes.

I noticed yesterday that streaming music is not affected, so I am guessing it has something to do with reading sound files on the hard drive. Any ideas? This is really driving me crazy!

Thanks much,

Coult69

Would love a response on this. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Coult69

Is the laptop still under warranty? If so, have HP fix it for you (although you might be without your laptop for awhile). If not, I guess you can try replacing the hard drive.

A hard drive creating that much EMI can't be healthy, so I would suggest making back-ups as of right now and looking at new hard drives.

Sorry Coult69 I can't help you since I don't know much about sound cards.

I have a bit of a similar problem, but with a new desktop computer. I didn't bother to start a new thread since this one already seems deal with sound card interference issues.

I don't have a separate sound card but the one integrated to the motherboard (MSI RS480M2-IL). I hear this quiet buzzing whenever I move mouse cursor ontop of something white on the Internet browser. And I hear these pops and clicks while listening to music every few seconds with both speakers and headphones. At worst it's like listening to an old gramophone. The occurrence of pops seem to correlate with the usage of the computing resources. I hear them most often when listening to mp3s but sometimes also with CDs. The same mp3 files worked fine with my old computer, with a PCI sound card.

Should I buy a new sound card and if so what card do you recommend?

The laptop is not under warranty anymore. I am convinced that this is something that I changed or was changed by software I have loaded, because until recently I never had any problems. Could it possibly be in selecting the priority of resources for a given application? It is definitely getting interferance when accessing the hard drive, I don't think it is anything else.

Nukephile - I would guess your problem is something similar to mine, but I still don't know where it is coming from. If you do replace the sound card I would be interested to hear what the results are. Good luck.

Anyone else?

Coult69

Nukephile- Do you have spreadspectrum turned on for your cpu and the like? Intergrated sound cards can have a problem where other componants EMI can cause problems.

I am convinced that this is something that I changed or was changed by software I have loaded, because until recently I never had any problems.Not necessarily. Hard drives have moving parts and will eventually fail. Plus they can just plain get old and noisy. It's possible that your hard drive is acting up, perhaps in death groans. If you know the manufacturer of the HD, you can download their diagnostic utility, run it from a floppy, and see if there's anything wrong with your hard drive. After 3 years, most laptop hard drives have seen better days...

It's likely a software conflict of some sort. I do DAW recording as a hobby and you'll always get that on a new system. Is the sound almost like "clicking" at a real high frequency? I'd check out http://www.musicxp.net/ to optimize your PC for audio.

Also google "mouse noise" at http://recording.org/forums-search.html

It's one of those problems that can be caused by a 100 different things. Update all your drivers/software... people underestimate the updates! You could start disabling things in the control panel until it goes away... try to narrow it down.

all else fails, try a PCMCIA sound card

I don't know if any of these suggestions will prove helpful, but there hasn't been a whole lot of feedback on this thread, and I am sure this is frustrating.

In your audio playback application, do you have an option to select both "Primary Sound Driver" as well as something refering to your sound card by name? I've gotten much better results when selecting the actual device rather than the one entitled "Primary Sound Driver."

Ensure that hardware acceleration is enabled for your audio card. You might also want to enable buffering and increase the buffer time. The interference you're attributing to the hard drive access could actually be caused by this.

The fact that you experience problems with mp3 files makes me think that the D/A conversion process is putting too much of a load on your cpu. I used to have 1.2 ghz Duron that hung and stuttered when playing back mp3 files. I also had a 400mhz PII that could playback mp3s smoothly and without a problem. The only difference was an el-cheapo Sound Blaster mp3+ sound card in the PII. The D/A conversion process was offloaded to the hardware of the sound card.

I liked the results so much that I immediately bought an external Sound Blaster mp3+ USB card for the old notebook someone gifted me. I paid something like $30 at Office Depot and it sounds great. Plus its got gold plated rca in/out, 1/8" microphone and headphone jacks, and toslink optical in/out for minidisk, dvd, etc. Mine is the model "SB0270" and I absolutely love it. Here's a link to the closest thing I could find on NewEgg, but you can find something even cheaper if you hunt around: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16829102174

I jus got new soundcard for my comp, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. No pops or clicks of any kind. This is how music is supposed to sound like. Spreadspectrum was on from the start, for whoever asked it.

Thanks for everyone who responded.

Thanks for the followup post. Its always nice to hear when people have success, rather than just bad news. Glad you got the problem resolved.