When I listen to anything - music, movies, whatever - on my laptop with headphones/earbuds/whatever, there’s an annoying hissing sound sustained, not just when the music or movie is playing but all the time. Mixed in with it is an occasional high pitched squeal. It’s faint enough that you can kind of forget about it after a while, but it’s still quite annoying.
How do I eliminate this? The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1720 if that helps. I must have the answer soon, as I will be taking a long train ride tomorrow and want to be able to listen and watch movies.
[Obligatory joke response: This {not a joke} cunt next to me in the common area of our condo complex is so fucking loud I can’t believe it].
Your problem can’t be solved without troubleshooting. There’s almost certainly not a ground loop, since your amplification and sound source = same. Feedback? Maybe. Don’t know enough about that to say.
I’d say, if it were my problem, a connection problem – are you sure your cans and source are seated properly? If not, troubleshoot by trying a different soundcard – I know it may not be possible, but if you know someone with a USB or FireWire card, install it and check. Or try other cans. I can’t think of anything else easy for you to check.
ETA there is something called a “noise floor” – I don’t know much about this, but I know enough about live sound to know it doesn’t matter to me when running output live. It’s a spec on most mixers, e.g. Maybe you’re just sensitive to +/- frequencies outside the specs of this sound card?
Cheap answer – buy a new soundcard. My little USb 1.1 M-Audio UA1EX was 80$ and works brilliantly even for running softsynths. Much quieter than onboard audio for regular old stereo sound from playback source (at least I think it’s quieter – maybe I just like the slighter better connections).
Sorry if I couldn’t help you out, but hardware is not my thing. Lots of geeks love this stuff – there’s bound to be an answer somewhere!
With all the money and power Dell has, why can’t they design a better headphone jack? Such a simple part of the computer, yet they still manage to fuck it up. That laptop, when I bought it, cost almost a thousand dollars. I really expect better quality. I am annoyed that I will have to spend more money on an additional sound card just to get a normal sound from the headphones that the damn computer should have come with in the first place.
In the sub-$1,000 PC laptop market, competition is fierce, margins are slim, and audio quality from the onboard headphone port is not the highest engineering priority.
While it’s aggravating to you, most people wouldn’t even notice (or care). It’s unlikely that people are going to comparison shop for cheap laptops on the basis of their headphone jack audio quality. So Dell doesn’t worry about it.
I seem to recall having similar problems with my old Apple PowerBook G4, from 2004 or so, as well as with pretty much every Dell I’ve ever used. I don’t think I ever used the jack on my Thinkpads. The headphone audio quality on my MacBook Pro (late 2009), on the other hand, is very good.
Hell, when I was a sophomore in college I had an old Dell Latitude laptop running Windows 98 and I would listen to music and play Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior all the time in class and I never, ever, ever had this headphone issue. If they could do it right then, they should be able to do it right now.
It sounds like you are listening to the laptop mic mixed with the desired signal – that would explain the hissing (room noise) and the feedback. See if you can mute the onboard mic.
Electronic noise from the computer itself is amplified into audibility by the final analogue output stage. To reduce this, increase your input sound levels (so, application volume controls) as much as possible, and reduce the output amplification as much as you can using the hardware volume controls on the laptop. This increases the signal-to-noise ratio, and may reduce the apparent problem. YMMV depending on hardware and your own personal thresholds.
The following is meant seriously and not as a joke or an insult: Buy a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. If you can’t do that, find someplace that is as near to completely quiet as possible in the middle of the night. Do you still hear the hissing sound and the occasional high-pitched squeal? Then the problem is not in your headphones or earbuds. You have tinnitus:
It took a long time for me to acknowledge that what I was hearing even when everything should be quiet around me came from my ears (or maybe within my head). Many of us spead so little time in completely quiet environments that we don’t quite notice the tinnitus. I thought I was hearing the 60-cycle hum of florescent lights when I was in a quiet room or that I was hearing the some sort of insect noise when I was out in the country. Also, it often takes years to creep up on you, so there’s no single point at which you might first notice it.
The most likely issues are as described earlier - poor quality of sound output implementation, plus the possibility of issues with the operating system’s sound management doing unfortunate things.
Both random noise and squeals can be often sheeted home to various power converters in the machine. For instance the backlight in a laptop not using LED backlights. Plus the huge number of various other power converters that exist to supply the myriad of different components with whatever voltage they need. If you look at the chips typically sold for portable audio they are depressingly low end. You can get audiable issues in the sound due to power supply and ground contamination with high frequency junk emitted by the various power converters and clocks. The nature of digital audio is such that this contamination does not need to be in the audio band either.
In general most laptops a not good. Even if you are lucky enough to have a quiet one, the sound is still far from HiFi.
The usual answer is indeed an external audio device. Typically a USB based one can be cheap and an astounding jump up in quality. They have begun to be fairly common. I have a Total Bithead which I bought about three years ago. You can go cheaper and much more expensive than this. Clearly the quality of headphones you use needs to be taken into consideration as to what quality of DAC and amp you buy. But it does make a bigger difference than you might like to believe. (I use some significantly more expensive gear too, but this little device is pretty good and amazes those that try it out.)
Most Likely explanation is poor internal isolation per the other answers.
But on the off chance it’s not one thing you might want to check is the relative sound levels. Different systems implement controls differently. Make sure your primary system sound level (set by speaker icon mixer at bottom right) is not set too low or the media player app may be trying to boost a low level signal leading to distortion.
Also check and see if your notebook has a manual volume control somewhere on the face or the chassis (ie wheel, slider, touch-bar etc). If this overriding manual control is set too low you will have to over boost the system levels (via mixer icon) to get louder sound and this will lead to hiss and distortion.