Electronic noise on Dell Studio Hybrid
 

Hi all,

My media box is a Dell Studio Hybrid running fedora 10. The sound output is often very noisy especially when a DVD is spinning, when the wireless mouse is moving or when the hard drive is accessed. I suppose this is due to some parasit noise and that there is little to do. Also the sound from DVDs is fairly low compared to that of mp3s. How can I boost that? Or maybe I should try to better ground the whole system..?

Ideas?

ET

PS : the box is standing next to a LCD wide screen but I doubt that produces any noise.

It sounds like your on-board sound card is suffering from interference. Therefore your best and cheapest option might be to purchase a USB soundcard and bypass your analog sound card.

Improving your system grounding, if there is any possibility of problem there, is most certainly the place that you start. The problem you describe can be the result of poor grounding or ground loops. It also could be due to a bad filter on the sound card, or unshielded wires to the speakers running parallel to the mouse/keyboard wires with poor grounding someplace (including the speakers).

It is not impossible that your sound card is bad, but that is the last place I would look.