P6N Diamond: Squealing noises through onboard X-FI

[jdlien]

I've been having fun with the sound on my P6N Diamond ever since I first got it. The main thing that's annoying me now is that the sound is permeated with a fairly noticeable squealing kinda noise that keeps alternating between a certain kind of tone and a slightly lower tone.

The sound on this board (Creative X-FI) has two outputs: A Rear output, and another (completely separate output) for the headphone jack. If you have things set up correctly, the system will detect that ou have a headphone plugged into the front panel jack, and automatically route sound through there... this is a great feature!

Unfortunately, that noise is far louder through the front output than the rear one, and that aside, it's far more noticeable through headphones than speakers. It's intolerable to listen to unless you've got some loud music on or something like that to cover it up.

I'm running Vista Ultimate, and I've alread tried turning off (disabling) the mic inputs, and going into the bios and disabling any unused hardware and such. The sound's characteristics do change if I run different kinds of graphical apps, or have a lot of disk activity, but it's pretty much constantly noisy.

[edit]I strongly doubt that this is driver related, because the noise first occurs as soon as you first see the windows loading screen (with the scrolling green bar at the bottom). I don't think any drivers for sound would be loaded this early in the boot process.[/edit]

I'm pretty disappointed because the onboard sound on this board is supposed to be phenomenal - pretty much the best onboard sound on the market, but it's pretty useless if I can't even tolerate the noise that comes through it.

Any ideas on what could be done to get rid of it would be appreciated!

[JTKWalesUK1981]

i see only 2 possibilities seeing u said u tried headphones instead of speakers which it could have been a speaker fault....

Either drivers even though u think it isnt or the sound card itself is at fault.

My Advice....... Uninstall the drivers and reinstall the latest ones available

What u got to lose?

[jdlien]

Definitely not drivers... I can actually disable the soundcard, and I still get plenty of noise... not as much mind you.

And it's also most definitely not speakers. I know full well what my $300+ Etymotic ER-4Ps sound like with a quality preamp, and regardless, I get the same sound out of my speakers (It's just not as noticeable, because the Etymotics are isolating heaphones so you can't hear anything but the sound coming into them from the source).

I actually updated the firmware on the bios, and I also tried improve cooling disconnecting other devices, disabling other devices in the BIOS, and a few other things, and nothing seemed to affect it.

Unfortunately it seems that the only real effective solution is to disable the damned onboard sound, get a good quality audio interface, and just not use onboard.

This isn't exactly a problem particular to this instance, but I really did expect better with the X-Fi on board. I guess onboard sound is inherently sh*t no matter what chip is powering it

Sad that manufacturers can't seem to isolate system noise from the sound this day in age. Maybe most users really don't care?