speakers suddenly do nothing but making scratching noises
 

when i was talking in skype yesterday, i recognized that the sound of my speakers was really bad compared to usual performance. this was not a completely new problem since something is messing with my volume control rather regularly. today i tried http://www.pandora.com/ and found out that my boxes only produce a scratching noise - there's nothing constructive or music-alike in that. tried both .mp3 and .ogg files on my harddisk to test it with the same result..

because of a lot of things that seem to happen "without me acting" i expect it to be a software failure and wonder if anyone of you has experienced something similar or just by theory knows how to fix it...!? else my speakers may have "died"?? :(

this is my mainboard with soundcard: ELITEGROUP K7VTA3 5.0, Athlon/Duron, Socket A, UDMA/133, KT333, 3x DDR, Sound, USB 2.0
... and i use "cambridge soundworks" speakers which do a great job since 2000...

regards
ungua

If you are sure that there is no problem with your speakers, and all hardware connections are fine, then you could try using running the application from a terminal window and see if it is giving any error messages.

If you are using alsa, then you could try using oss (or vice versa) as your audio output driver.

Also, mplayer usually gives good error messages. That may help you understand what really is going on.

Another possibilty is that the speakers may be haunted. Try playing a song backwards and maybe there will be a hidden message?

i'll buy the last one... :cool: :D i don't get any error messages and doubt that i suddenly have to switch drivers. but i can try... one thing is that i recently installed a multimedia pack, that may be a reason. but then i wonder why the speakers don't make problems at once!?

regards
ungua

the hardware is alright. i didn't find out how to switch from alsa to oss and don't know what it is anyway. i don't know how to run the application from terminal window either and i don't have mplayer. :o

talking about a difficult patient... ;)

regards
ungua

I got scratching noises in my speakers (not suddenly, though) and fixed it by muting channels one by one in alsamixer until I found out which one was causing the problem. Perhaps something in the multimedia packages reset your alsamixer settings or something.

i tried to mute one by one and then i even tried to boost every volume to 100, one by one. strange enough i can still enjoy skype-conversations, but that's the one and only audio-application working. maybe i could just (re)install alsamixer? i use kamix now, which comes with the box.

regards
ungua