Audio Problem - Intense PC

[ronywin]

Thanks JuTs, but it didn't work for me

Just changing the power plan to "power saver"?

Anyway, can someone help me?

[gabrielh]

Are we talking about an HDMI sound, an analog sound or the audible humming?

[ronywin]

The humming...

Another thing that happens to me (that maybe will help you help me) is when I take the volume all the way down, the humming sound increases and becomes much much louder and annoying.

[ronywin]

Something?

אני ממש צריך עזרה, לא יכול ככה עוד!

[gabrielh]

To make it clear, are we talking about humming coming from the speakers, or from the system?

[ronywin]

from the speakers

[vtailor]

It helps to enable HDMI sound in the biios, under Southbridge->azalia, if you plan to do HDMI sound only.

Well, actually, I have tried all sorts of azalia sound chip settings in the bios, but the "auto" with HDMI enabled seems to make the most sense. Right this very minute, I am listening to analog music playing on the intense pc, but there is a scratchy sound accompanying it, and the "Sound" setting in Control Panel thinks I have an spdif device connected. Oh yes, to get the scratchy analog sound, you set the volume control at about 5, louder or softer turns the analog volume down. In other words, analog is working badly for the wrong reasons. With your driver. After testing all kinds of other realtek drivers, which were much worse for analog sound.

[vtailor]

The HDMI to analog audio converter in my HDMI monitor is basically running at 41000 and 44000, medium studio quality. If you buy a newer USB sound card with analog output for your downmixed SRS 7.1 sound, you get roughly that sound quality, and it shows up under Windows 7/8 as a separate sound device with a built-in driver. That resolves the ALC888 missing analog sound driver for Windows 7/8 problem and gives "studio quality" synchronized sound at maybe a 3% CPU overhead, based on doing it in Linux.

The question is whether the ALC888 sound chip that comes on Intel boards of any kind is ready for use with a 7.1 -> 2.1 sound bar with surround sound. Judging from Linux (again), which works with alsa, the ALC888 used by Intel on its boards has a strange pre-emphasis and sound distortion problem at both ends of the audio spectrum.

P. S. The USB sound card with its own built-in sound chip is so far the best analog solution for this and any sibling Intel systems with the ALC888 chip that ignores the realtek sound driver. There are also a few of these sound cards with analog outputs for old-fashioned "home theater" sound systems, at 2.1, 5.1, and 7.1, but they use 60% of the CPU with little or no video going under Linux, which is an unacceptable overhead.

[vtailor]

I need to correct the above: There are some audio pages that will use up the CPU with any sound card, not simply the above USB sound card with all the home theater options. In reality, the USB sound cards add at most another 1-2 % of CPU overhead from my measurements.

[vtailor]

I mentioned elsewhwere that the latest Windows 8 OEM installation DVD does a complete installation with no Compulab drivers needed and a "Graphics Properties" box from the Intel Windows 8 driver. The missing item is the analog output, but there is a built in driver for a usb analog sound card, and Windows 8 even updates the usb sound card driver during installation. In short, I think Compulab could include its own approved usb analog sound card in their list of accessories for sale. Or, there are several sold by amazon.com in the US, avoid the one that has right to left sound.

I turned off the azalia sound chip in the bios settings and am running on some inconspicuous analog stereo sound card using the Linux setup at the moment. (Linux has built-in usb sound card drivers also.)