Question Internal Audio Feedback?

[BlakeFazio]

Hi all,

CONTEXT: So I was on voice chat (Discord) with some people, but then disconnected and left to go eat lunch. Everything was working fine at this point. Then I come back and rejoin, everybody starts yelling "AAAAAAAAH KILL IT! WHAT IS THAT?!?!" They were hearing some otherworldly, hellish noises coming from my mic. So I left to spare their ears, naturally. My computer hadn't so much as gone to sleep, yet the change had happened somehow on it's own. I cannot find any other footage of this sound anywhere on the web, and I have no idea what to even call it.

Here is what it sounds like: https/www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6D6XCOBH88 It starts quiet and gets louder at around (0:15) for those who are having trouble hearing it. Note: I was not moving the microphone or bumping anything, nor was I making any noise in the room.

(I'll post my specs at the bottom)

To clarify, the sound is not audible to me unless I manually make my mic output come through my headphones (ex. when I'm testing my audio, like in the video) via Sound settings in the Control Panel or Discord's tester. From these tests, I can confirm that others CAN hear the sound even when NO mic is plugged in.

The sound coming through the headphones remained perfect, however. I put on some YouTube to check that side of things and all was well, so the problem seems isolated to the microphone.

I tried my headphones and my earbuds, both of which had good listening-to-YouTube status. Regardless of what mic was plugged in, or if there was even one in at all, the hellish noise continued unchanged for listeners of my mic-output.

I do not have any wireless equipment, other than the Wi-Fi repeater that I have used for over 2 years now with no problems.

I do occasionally change which pair of headphones are plugged in (the headphones and the earbuds), but I don't mess with any settings at all when I do so. All I do is pull one out of the splitter and put the other in.

I am running Windows 10.

My sound software I use is the "Sound Blaster Z-series Control Panel"

I have disabled all devices other than my Microphone and Speakers (headphones) devices via Sound settings in Control Panel.

When watching my Microphone device in the Sound settings, it's little green meter continually goes up and down even when no mic is plugged in.


So I did some tests:

- I put my sound card into another slot, no change.
-Reinstalling the sound card, no change

• I tried using the "mic-in" and "speakers" ports at the back of the computer. These ports seem to be tied to my integrated sound on my motherboard, as Realtek's audio manager popped up. I closed it as I want to use my Sound Blaster Z sound card instead.
• I tried using the "mic-in" and "speakers" ports at the front of the computer. This time nothing popped up from Realtek, but I also could not hear anything anymore. ( i had YouTube playing so i could track if the speakers were continuing to work properly)

-Using integrated sound (Realtek) by disabling my Sound Card again and re-enabling the old Realtek stuff, all was well actually. No hellish noise from my Mic output.

SOUND CARD: Sound Blaster Z (drivers up-to-date)
GPU: GTX 1070
CPU: i7 6700K
MEMORY(RAM): 16GB
MOTHERBOARD: ASUSTek Z-170-K

Essentially, I want to use my Sound Card because the whole reason I got it was that Realtek was finicky for me. The demons who are featured in the video don't seem to want me to. Thanks much, this is quite the doozie. Or maybe it's not and I'm just a n00b

edit: Oops, this was not supposed to go in the Laptops region it was supposed to go in the Audio region.

 

[COLGeek]

I would suggest you start a thread on our sister site, Tom's Hardware:

Components

forums.tomshardware.com