X-Fi Left Channel - Heavy Static

[cheesetogo]

A few days ago, I pulled at my headphones with a pretty strong jerk by accident, and they started to blast out a high pitched sound. At first I believed that I had broken my headphones, but I found that they only emitted the sound when connected to the computer that this originally happened with - they worked normally with my laptop. My sound card is an X-Fi extreme music.

I reset the computer, and it stopped emitting the noise. However, it seems as though the left channel audio has gotten messed up, in that I'll hear a (varying) amount of static through it. This only effects the left channel. It happens with both my speakers and headphones. I've noticed that sometimes it will die down or even dissipate for a while, but it will always come back. I haven't really seen any reason to why it will die down or come back up.

Has the card probably gone bad?

 

[Blind Man]

maybe try reseating the card? could have pulled it out a bit or something

 

[Caine Thanatos]

I had also a similar problem with my x-fi, on the front Right . when I played music you could hear a distortion and sometimes out of the blue my computer froze up and static noise over all channels. found out that my x-fi was borked (well I narrowed it down to the x-fi)

I also had sometimes noises (no freeze) and when I rebooted my computer , it was gone

so could be that your x-fi also a bit broken ( well they all are from the beginning )

 

[Puterguru]

I have the same issue. What do you guys recommend other than Creative?

 

[Caine Thanatos]

I am currently using my onboard realtek ALC882 , with optical output to my receiver
i am not sure if I get a improvement with other soundards , when using a digital output

personally I am waiting for an via envy pci express or an pci express cmedia solution (one that is a bit cheaper than the asus one)

Asus cards arent bad, but the xonar Dx uses a coax to optical dongle (or what ever you call it). the xonar D2x is pretty nice, but pretty expensive, if you dont get better audio quality. maybe lower cpu usage that my realtek chippy (when encoding to DTS realtime).

another option is an audio card with an CMI 8738 / 8768 chip (cmedia) and then use the opensource drivers (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums homebrew

but they don't have (obvioulsy) no support for realtime dts encoding