Headphones issue

Rufus_Shinra

So I got some Sennheiser PX100's. Put them in my mp3 player and they sound wonderful, almost angelic.

After a short while I want to listen to a video off of my computer and put them in the speaker slot. Immediately there is a faint hissing sound in the right ear phone.

I believe the issue is the computer is sending out a signal with too high of an impedance or something along those lines. Now I was wondering if there was any way to tone down the (power, impedance, decibels, whatever it is) my computer is sending out to the level of my mp3 player where it doesn't create hissing.

Note: when the computer has absolutely minimum volume the hissing remains, and when the mp3 player is on max volume, no hissing.

Locust76

Go through your mixer settings and mute everything that's not WAVE or MIDI. Make sure you have all the options available by opening the mixer, going to Options>Properties and make sure every box is checked under "Show the following volume controls."

What kind of soundcard do you have, by the way? If it's only coming out of one side, it's possible that your soundcard may be receiving interference if the device isn't good quality.

st0ned messiah

Are you using onboard sound? My motherboard sound is crap and makes the same kind of hissing noise but my sound card is fine.

nexuscrawler

Are you plugging them directly into your soundcard or into a headphone jakc on your speakers? From my experience the speaker set's jacks blow nuts and introduce alot of static.

EggyToast

Yeah, cheap soundcard introducing interference. Either electrical "bleeding" or poor grounding of some sort. It's on the inside of your computer, as well, and I can pretty much guarantee that whatever you have in there is very poorly shielded against the stuff you're hearing.

So it's not your headphones. There are a few solutions, varying in prices and complexity, so if you're keen on fixing it, let us know how much you want to spend, and we'll see what we can come up with?

trixtah

yeah, I had this problem plugging into speaker jacks (most of the time theyre absolute shit) and plugging into onboard sound. I remedied it by getting a nice sound card.

Rook

Check which speaker jack you're plugging them into. My Dell PC at work has one at the back on the motherboard (sounds wonderful, dead silent) and one on the front for convenience (specifically for headphones I guess), except it hisses like fucking crazy.

As a rule, most motherboards have pretty solid on-board sound

Fibretip

yeah, it's probably the mobo... mine outputs really nicely through speakers, but whenever i plug my headphones into it... it hisses, and if everything else is silent.. you can hear this humming buzz through the headphones whenever you move the mouse... it's really annoying!