Help! Audio noise from cd/dvd drive

Hi all... hope you are having a great, long weekend.

Wondering if anyone has successfully tackled the problem of having speaker noise from a cd/dvd/cdrw drive. I have invested lots of cash in my speaker system and now I'm getting a high pitched whine through my speakers from both my dvd and cdrw drives.

Anyone know a way to remedy this problem? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

Well, I installed the latest NForce drivers and it helped a bit... It's not gone, but quite a bit better.

 

It's not uncommon to upgrade to good speakers & have them show up shortcomings elsewhere in the sound chain.

How are you determining it's the CD/DVD drives generating the noise? Does it go away when you pull down the sliders for CD-In and whatever the other one is on? It's way abnormal for a drive to add any sound, and hard to believe that you'd have 2 of them doing it. Noisy soundcards are fairly common, but you mentioned nForce drivers, so I assume you're using the nVidia onboard sound? That's generally pretty quiet.

Is your whine steady tone, all the time, or intermittent, or does the pitch change any when you insert a cd or at any other times? Is it a true whine, or more of a "shhhhhhh" sound?

What operating system, sound card (or onboard) and speakers are you using?
If you're using WinXP, are you using analog or digital sound off of the drives?

 

Thanks for your reply...

Sorry, forgot that my signature no longer has that information.

Yeah, nForce2 chipset on A7N8X Deluxe board with Audigy 2 sound card (on board sound is turned off) and XP Pro. Drives are both Lite-On and I'm using analog sound.

The noise is coming from the drives and it is from both of them. I do not know if the drives are accentuating a sound that is already there or causing it, themselves. The noise starts when a disk is loaded and is a distinctive spinning up of the drive and actually changes pitch as the rpm of the drive increases and decreases.

 

Audigy 2 has a good sound/noise ratio; that shouldn't be a problem. The fact that the noise changes pitch as the drives spool up sounds like your audio cable is picking up a bit of noise from the drive motors. Not common, but possible.

With WinXP, you don't need to use analog sound at all. Go into either the drives' properties or sound properties (I'm at work with NT4; don't remember for sure.) and enable digital sound and that should eliminate any analog noise that the cable is picking up.

If that doesn't cure it, holler back & we'll look further.

 

Hmm.. turns out I did have digital output enabled on both drives. With the dang skin I'm using, it's difficult to tell when a box is checked. Time to change the skin...

I actually tried changing the internal cable once and that didn't help, either... argh!

Thanks, again, for the help.

 

Hm. Digital signal shouldn't be susceptible to interference. Try unplugging the audio cable altogether; digital sound doesn't need it; it uses the IDE cable.

 

Thanks... I'll definitely try that, but gaming right now.

 

Ah, G.T., thanks... it was the cable, afterall. Removed it and no noise at all. I thought I had tried that, but must not have because it solved the problem completely.

Thanks again!

 

Glad that cured it. First instance of it I've heard of, but knowing the signal path, that seemed to be the most likely culprit. You must have one noise box inside, electrically.

 

Actually, I think it might be from the Lite-On drives. I really love their drives, but they can be a bit noisy. They are very inexpensive (for what you get), so it's possible that something is not well shielded in there... I dunno. This particular subject is definitely one I need to learn more about.