Sound Drowned in Certain Applications

[guitto]

Hello,

I noticed about a week ago that while playing counter strike and listening to Pandora radio, the sound would go from a drowned, ( only way I can explain it is the same thing for sound when you see something through cloudy glass ) and back to normal at different intervals, non specific. At random parts of the songs/sound it would act as a wave in sound, going in and out. Became very annoying so I thought it was the just the incompetence of onboard sound (6 channel audio). I bought a SB X-Fi PCIe sound card and installed it and it has seemed to fix the problem with the sound going in and out, all drivers working properly etc. The same day I bought the card, after thinking it was all gone, I go to watch a youtube video and the sound is completely unaudible, the same effect as before, but a constantly low distortion. Now if I go to pandora, the audio is crystal. I tried connecting a 5.1 and optical headphone setup and same results. I cannot think of what it could be. Im using XP 32 bit, all latest drivers for the sound card.

Any clues on how to diagnose this further or any known solutions to a problem similar to this? I appreciate it.

Guitto

 

[guitto]

Wierd, I now opened Pandora.com in one tab, youtube in another. If I play the pandora @ full volume I can hear the audio of the youtube video perfectly, if I drop the volume in pandora and dont touch youtube, both volumes go down. If i pause pandora, the youtube goes back to its faded out distortion. I have no clue what this is =/

 

[Darth_Terra1]

It could be pandora is conflicting with the settings of the sound card in some way, I dont use pandroa so i cant be sure, how is it when pandora isn't running at all is the sound still distorted. ?

 

[guitto]

yes, the sound is still distorted, and now when I play pandora and css, the pandora starts going in and out and css has an echo equal to the number of times I alt tab. I alt tab twice, i hear a double echo. etc. I think I just might reformat and see if that will take care of it.