My speakers are popping loudly.

[Michael Adcock]

I have a computer I assembled about a month ago, with an FIC SD-11 motherboard, Athlon 500 CPU, CD-ROM, ATAPI ZIP drive, and HP Colorado tape drive.

I have all five PCI slots occupied: a serial card with two 16650's, an ATA-66 controller card, a voice modem, a NIC, and a SoundBlaster Live! Value. Video is a Matrox G400 Max.

Attached to the sound card I have Sony SAVA-7 speakers (just the two main speakers). From time to time (and lately most of the time), they begin to pop real loudly. It gives me the impression that electrically something is not right, but when I examine the computer, all seems to be OK in terms of components not touching one another and being securely attached.

Any suggestions as to how to run this problem down? By the way, my Hewlett-Packard tape drive went bad, and the system locks up relatively frequently. Perhaps the motherboard is bad? How does one tell?

The lockups I blame on Windows, but I do have a problem with my display, as well: sometimes when Alt-Tab'ing back from my full-screen DOS app (WordPerfect), the screen will be black and only rectangles become visible as I pass my mouse over areas of the desktop. Matrox advised me to get the newest patches from VIA, who handles the south bridge (that does not do AGP, anyway, does it?). I did. I also have the patch put out by AMD (miniport_445).

What do y'all think? Thanks for any help.

[yammahoppy]

dont know if this is the answer but might check to make sure the speakers are not plugged into the amplified out slot. amplified speakers that get plugged into the amplifies out slot will pop.

hope this helps.

[Michael Adcock]

Thanks, Yammahoppy. I could find nothing about amplification in the documentation on the SoundBlaster card. Actually the documentation leaves something to be d, IMHO. It does not even tell you which jack does what: there are five of them, color coded, but just these inane little icons stamped into the steel that don't "intuitively" mean any-thing to me!

I appreciate your reply and attempt to be helpful.

[netsurfer]

I actually had the same things occur with my SB Live!

The reason turned out to be that my PCI video card was causing some sort of problems with the SB Live... so eventually when I finally got my AGP CL TNT2Ultra, it pretty much fixed it.

Now I know, your G400 is AGP, but perhaps another one of your PCI cards may be hampering the PCI bus a bit to cause the popping.

You can check the SB Live! newsgroup:

news://news.creativelabs.com/creative.products.sound_blaster.live