Onboard vs Cheap USB SoundCard? Options

[saratoga]

It's not ear splitting, there is a good chance I'll reach there with a beer or two ;-)

Alright, then it sounds like it might be a little underpowered for you. Stick with the internal.

Can I plug both my speakers to the out port and my headphones to the headphones port at the same time? or will it overload the onboard card and I should plug one in and disconnect the other?

Some boards disable the other output when one is in use. You'd have to test it and see. I doubt you'll damage anything if that is your concern.

[Tall-Guy]

I prefer to have them both plugged in at the same time to avoid tearing the 3.5 jack after a while. Maybe there is an option to switch between the two outputs from the RealtekHD menu. Even if there is no loss in quality when both the Speakers and the Headphones are being used at the same time, I bet there is some processing power downgrade to it (which might be visible in CPU heavy tasks like Video Games).

[Brand]

There is a way to switch the outputs on/off in the Realtek HD Audio Manager (without physically unplugging), but it's not very intuitive, so I might as well save you the trouble of figuring it out:
1. Go to "Device advanced settings"
2. For "Playback Device" select the "Mute the rear output device, when a front headphone plugged in"
3. When you have both plugged in (rear output and front output) double click (or R-click) on the green circle to pop up "Device retasking" on either the Front Panel or Back Panel
4. To play through both, set both to "Front Speaker Out"
5. To disable one of them, set it to "Rear Speaker Out"

This works for me, but it could depend on the driver/device version..

This post has been edited by Brand: May 27 2012, 12:10

[Tall-Guy]

It's working Brand, Thank you :-)

One last question before sealing this off. The Biggest plus of the USB Sound Card is the fact I couldn't hear any Static. I knew the static is pretty common on Onboard cards, and especially on front panel ports. It's only bother me when nothing is being playing (it's easy to detect when I'm scrolling with my mouse), even though - any easy way to fix it? I guess I'll have to play around with the wires for that?

Thanks.

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

It's working Brand, Thank you :-)

One last question before sealing this off. The Biggest plus of the USB Sound Card is the fact I couldn't hear any Static. I knew the static is pretty common on Onboard cards, and especially on front panel ports. It's only bother me when nothing is being playing (it's easy to detect when I'm scrolling with my mouse), even though - any easy way to fix it? I guess I'll have to play around with the wires for that?

Noise while scrolling the mouse is sometimes caused by bus contention for the video card. Seems like a leap -eh? The problem is that the video card actually has a big workload when superimposing the cursor on top of the desktop video. Of course the video card isn't supposed to do this, but stuff happens. Your choices are:

(1) Update drivers
(2) Go into video card parameters and reduce "hardware acceleration"
(3) Roll the dice and get a different video card.

[Tall-Guy]

Well, Drivers (Video and Audio) are already updated and getting a new Video Card is not an option yet
I'll try reducing the Hardware acceleration when I'm home to see if it works.

I can still hear static when I'm not touching the mouse though. Coming from the same issue?

[phofman]

When my little tripath amp was powered from internal PSU +12V line, I could hear (when put to max volume) mouse moving, letters appearing in a terminal, keyboard typing, HDD seeking. IMO the CPU interrupts put that much noise on the power supply line. After building a simple standalone +12V PSU the amp is dead silent now. My PCI soundcard (Infrasonic Quartet) employs multiple voltage regulators onboard, keeping the output clean.

IMO the problem is noise on supply lines generated by the CPU servicing USB interrupts.

[Tall-Guy]

OK. Solved.

What I did basically was to open the Case, and do two things:

1. disconnect the USB extension from the front panel (as It's running just near the Audio Cable and seems like it's causing some interference
2. Took a iron foil (If that's how it's being called in English), wrapped the cable up, and use a tape over it avoid anything touching the iron directly.

It seems like this was just enough shielding to make the crackling go away. So now I have a crackling free port with the best sound quality I could get from the gear I own. Thank you very much for your help guys, the experience was very educational