Sound issues

[krispos42]

Hi everyone, got a minor issue that I'd like to fix.

I'm running a Windows 7 PC. About a year ago I bought a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti video card so this repurposed office computer could do better graphically.

It replaced the built-in VGA card. Now instead of a VGA cable for video and a 3.5mm jack for audio, it is HDMI. I'm using a 32" HDTV for a monitor. It's been working very well graphically; the card has 4 gigs of RAM on it, which doubled the amount of RAM in the case, and combined with an SSD it actually runs things like KSP and a few other games pretty well.

The issue I'm having, though, is that when I'm sitting here I like to stream a local radio station (I'm just barely out of reception range). The sound often slows down and gets a very compressed, digital sound to it that grates on my ears.

This also happens on YouTube videos.

The internet speeds are fine. I'm hard-wired to the router. Using the WiFi, I can easily stream Netflix and Hulu on my other TVs. Also, when I stream the same radio station on my phone or through my living room TV, it also sounds just fine.

It's only on this computer that the sound gets like this sometimes.

I can't seem to find anything like a buffer to adjust. It just happens and I don't know how to adjust anything to fix it. Any ideas?

Thank you for your time!

[mr_lebowski]

1. What happens if you hook back up the old sound system with the audio cable

And switch from HDMI for sound back to your built-in sound chip as you ran it before? If it works fine, you can just leave the cable hooked up and switch sound sources in Windows when listening to the radio, not super convenient but not THAT bad.

Also you didn't double the memory by getting a gfx card with 4GB of VRAM. Video card ram is for video card 'stuff' only. Basically VRAM comes into play when gaming or doing 3d design work (and transcoding, if you use the GPU to do it) ... and that's about it.

IOW, you're still running Windows on 4GB, which pretty dang low for Windows 7. Does this problem still happen when the ONLY thing you're running in Windows is the radio streaming app?

[krispos42]

3. I don't think I can do that

The input for doing the headphone jack is part of the "VGA" input on the TV. You know, three HDMI inputs, one coax, two AV in (yellow/white/red), two component in (those are the RGB, I think), 2 S-video and one VGA/3.5mm jack.

I know I didn't double the system RAM, but I moved the audio and video processing to the video card, which has a lot more horsepower than the built-in card. It was a mild office PC; the motherboard maxes out at 4 gig of RAM so I can't do anything more with that. The SSD helps a lot with making it run faster than it did originally, and of course the video card dramatically increased the graphics capability.

I listen to the streaming when I'm using Firefox. Basically, websurfing. I sometimes use it for iTunes or other downloading software, but not that often, and I shut them down completely when I'm done with them. I do have BOINC (for SETI@home) but it is set to not be active when somebody is using the computer. Plus I have the usual anti-virus protection.

I get the problem whether I use Chrome or Firefox, but not all the time, and not immediately. Stopping and restarting the stream does not help.

Hmmm... answering your question made me look at Carbonite, which run continuously. I was trying to stream the music while I answered this, but it began to degrade. So I changed a setting on Carbonite so it doesn't run in the afternoon (when most of the use is) and restarted the stream. Now it sounds good.

I wonder if that was it!

[Newest Reality]

2. The obvious question:

Did you try updating the sound drivers?

Also, even if the video is working alright, updating the video drivers is also a shot you can take.

[krispos42]

4. I did that; I let Windows look for updated drivers

It didn't find any.

[Newest Reality]

5. Ok...

If you are comfortable with it, you can check the sound card manufacturer and model #, go to their site and there should be a recent driver package download. Reinstalling drivers could be something to try here.

Another suggestion: Open task manager and note how many processes are running. Now, it all depends on your configuration and machine, but if there are a inordinate numbers of one process running or hundreds of processes in total, (which could be a virus or malware) that can bog a machine down and cause speed problems which then might interfere with the sound playing.

That's just another troubleshooter.