Any computer whizzes out there??

trailspirit
trailspirit Posts: 38
edited October 2010 in The Crudcatcher
Inherited a PC from my sister - Dell XPS 210 circa 2006 - XP o/s
Can't get any sound and I think one of her kids has broken a headphone jack in the line out socket. I cannot get to the offending article or the line out as it's really, really, really ( you get the picture? ) buried in the innards of the machine.
Is there any way I can disable the line out / headphone socket so the sound card thinks it's not there or not in use, 'cause that's the only way I can think of to get sound again???

Cheers!!!

Comments

  • theres a thin wire inside the jack which acts as a physical switch for the main audio output. 99% of the time in onboard audio devices theres no software method of controlling this. what ever is stuck inside is bridging the contacts.

    short of clearing it, which will probably end up fudging it well and truely.....would you conside desoldering the mini transistor controlling the individual port on the board? :twisted:

    the 3 jacks work in series, so only other thing i can think of is adding a new sound card device or bypassing to another set of ports for example
    Crafted in Italy apparantly
  • There may be an option in the Bios. But knowing what Dell are like, probably not! The next option is to disable it in Device Manager and add a PCI sound card. Which will likely be much better anyway
  • cicatriz
    cicatriz Posts: 411
    New sound card will only cost a few quid. You might even get one second hand from an independant PC shop. Easy things to fit and will give better sound than any onboard sound.
  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Posts: 79,667
    cicatriz wrote:
    and will give better sound than any onboard sound.
    Not neccesarily. On board sound is pretty damned good these days, and you'd struggle to beat it without going for a studio-type soundcard.
  • craker
    craker Posts: 1,739
    Yeah, get something of the 'bay

    http://shop.ebay.co.uk/i.html?_nkw=soundblaster&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=

    crikey, most of the cards are top notch creative stuff going for pennies. Those Audigy cards were the equivalent of high end graphics cards in years gone by. Any idea what software you need to take advantage of the DSP? Or are modern CPUs so powerful that it wouldn't do alot for you anyway?
  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Posts: 79,667
    DSP? what do you want to use the DSP for?
    Creative drivers suck major balls. Best thing to do is just install the bare minimum driver to get it to work, and sod the rest of their software package, which loads countless popups when windows loads, and brings your machine to a bleeding crawl. And adds no useful functionality.
  • craker
    craker Posts: 1,739
    well ... depends what you want to do with your card. If you're trying to mix 48 channels of samples at different bit rates with effects on each channel then a DSP comes into its own.

    However you may just want your computer to go 'bing' when an email arrives. Horses for courses..


    (Edit)
    Been disappointed with the sample quality you get from on board audio too. If you're into turning your vinyl into MP3 then invest in a sound card.

    That one conclusion was drawn from an intel chipsetted mobo vs. some cheapy soundblaster I got for £5 off the bay - the latter was _much_ better quality.
    Cheap mobo = cheap sound chip IME
  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Posts: 79,667
    mr_si wrote:
    well ... depends what you want to do with your card. If you're trying to mix 48 channels of samples at different bit rates with effects on each channel then a DSP comes into its own.
    However you may just want your computer to go 'bing' when an email arrives. Horses for courses..
    DSP is great for doing that al ultra-low latency, by which I mean less than 5milliseconds. But one of our editing workstations is a native system, meaning is uses exclusively CPU power (no specialist DSP chip) and it happilly churns through over a hundred channels of audio, with dynamics and EQ on each channel, plus several reverb busses, multiple stems mixes, and sample-accurate metering, all whilst playing back uncompressed broadcast video.
    And it does it all with a sytem throughput from input to output in less than 6 milliseconds.

    We also have DSP-based systems for recording multitrack, so we can get I/O latencies down to 128 samples, so that drummers, and musicians don't hear any delay in their headphones.

    DSP is not needed for pretty much any consumer use. In fact, games stopped using soundcard DSP quite a while ago, instead relying on CPU-based methods.
    And, if I remember rightly, Vista onwards don't even support the use of creative's DSP anymore.

    And another thing, all the Audigys ran at 48Khz sampling rate. They resampled everything else to that, even if your system sampling frequency was set to 44.1, or even 96Khz.
    And one more thing, mixing sample rates is a very rare scenario that just wasn;t supported on Windows until recently, although i think apple's core-audio had the ability.
  • Thewaylander
    Thewaylander Posts: 8,594
    Only downside to on board sound these days is keeping up with changing formats. Though not so much of an issue HD audio is output through HDMI on the graphics card. But the slight processor overhead that onboard cards suffer from, but on modern PC's with processors clocking up over 3Ghz it's really a non event.
  • Interestingly following on from what yeeha said about the quality of on board sound. A friend posted this on facebook

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mab_YNmX9Ao

    When I played it through my laptop I could hear it for what it is, dub; but another friend played it through his speaker system connected to his pc and couldn't pick up the bass at all.

    I used to work in radio and it really irks me when people negelct sound quality, it can make such a huge difference to your experinece of all things webby.
    The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns
    momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Posts: 79,667
    Cleat Eastwood, that sound more like a speaker system issue than a soundcard issue.