Sound Card Distortion on MSI 870A-G54

**Caden Fernandes** · 13-03-2011

I purchased a MSI G54-870A before few weeks, and even though the sound card that sounds fine nearly all of the time, I had intermittent crackling / distortion. That from time to time out, or become extremely distorted, and order the sound like blowing bubbles. The sound cuts in and out very quickly. At first, all went very very very rarely, and I did not want to mess with trying to fix, but is increasingly common. Now occurs in bursts, will be distorted for a minute or so, in bursts, and then be okay for a couple of hours. I checked the driver updates, but says it depends on the date. In no way distorted in the identical place in the similar song twice. Also, I checked both the motherboard and the ports case, and occurs in both.

**Logan.M** · 13-03-2011

Make sure any short-circuit has not happened. You can remove the motherboard from the box and test on a nonconductive surface such as unpainted wood, cardboard flat (no stain), or a normal newspaper, does not stain. DO NOT use the static - it conducts electricity. Check for extra separators that do not match the holes in the motherboard, look at the labels on the I / O board to ensure that they are playing what is supposed to touch. If you do RMA, you must remove the HS and CPU. Just send the MOBO. If you send the CPU, you cannot retrieve it - again, just return the MOBO.

**Balamani** · 13-03-2011

If cracks occur when the CPU is under stress, so are the PCI bus. Therefore

(1) Check this card in all other PCI slots as well.

(2) Turn off onboard sound in BIOS.

(3) Change the PCI latency values - just play with them to find an optimal

In theory, for superior PCI performance, a longer latency should be used. So I suggest you to try increasing it to 64 cycles or even 128 cycles. But keep in mind the optimal value for each system can be different. On the other hand a long latency period may also reduce the performance of other PCI devices queue can be paralyzed for a long time. Sound Cards send comparatively petite bursts of data to the PCI bus extra frequently, for example, then the graphics card. So a shorter latency PCI (eg, 32) may work better. Try it.

**Nutty** · 13-03-2011

I had this same problem today and I could not believe it! Luckily, I had my Harmon Kardon SoundSticks plugged .. are digital through USB, not using the X-Fi at all, in any way. So ... I changed them out to see if the crackling was still there ... and of course it was. Such blocked for me it was not the X-Fi after all. I tried playing with the proper settings and then rebooted the machine, Crackling was gone!

**Alexisus** · 13-03-2011

Make sure you have all the connectors loose audio speaker system. In other words, Majority people these days have surround sound systems speakers joined to their computers. If you only connect one of the headphone jacks and leave the other loose, it will crack when they come into contact with something conductive. As if you had a short somewhere in the audio cabling.

**Calandar** · 13-03-2011

I cannot understand what could have caused this. I have a bluetooth USB optical mouse, and a previous post, I wondered if that was all ... but I've had that and it was not until today that I learned that crackling little. However, I rebuild this team yesterday, putting in a new case from Cooler Master, adding RAID-0, building operating system from scratch, and playing various mini-plugs (looking for the most accurate sound signal). I do not know which of these activities could have caused the noise crackling ghost. It only lasted about 10 minutes or so, until you restart ... but that was so evident with the HK SoundSticks, again, leads me to believe that there may have been the X-Fi at all ... or maybe it was .... Well, it's gone ... I'll have to think more about what I did could have caused this. I'll follow my team down at any moment should not be obedient, so I hope it's not the case.

**Terrextre** · 14-03-2011

I managed to temporarily alleviate the problem by doing three things:

1) The starting of the audio control panel (double click the little sound icon in the system tray on the taskbar) and all mute, but the "Play Control" and options "Wave." (Be definite to turn all under "Options-> Properties").

2) Mute and unmute the "Play Control" a few times which does not seems to be work everything.

3) Pull the connection to the headphones and put it back in time also helped. (It almost seemed like a loop that builds on itself over time).

The final solution was to buy a sound card. Apparently, it just faulty hardware. This made the problem completely disappear.