HTPC cracking noise during loud explosions through HMDI

[Mooney]

oops. i meant hdmi, obviously.

i have a dell m1330 laptop, and am using its HDMI output to pass SPDIF 5.1 audio to my onkyo 805. i have windows xp installed, as well as windows 7 build 7000, and have the exact same performance in each.

i know its not an issue with the cable, or receiver, or speakers because i simply unplug the hdmi cable from the back of my xbox 360 and plug it into my laptop, and i just tested my batman begins hd-dvd through the 360 and had it so loud my ears almost bled and there was no popping or cracking noises during explosions.

i have the latest k-lite codec pack installed, and use ac3filter with media player classic to play ac3 720p mkv bluray rips. i tried VLC but can't get 5.1 audio to work at all, its all jumpy and such. it seems whatever things i try in ac3filter don't do anything - like lowering the volume by 20db doesn't seem to actually do anything in media player classic.

any suggestions? sorry if there was a better place for me to pose this question.

 

[TLS Guy]

oops. i meant hdmi, obviously.

i have a dell m1330 laptop, and am using its HDMI output to pass SPDIF 5.1 audio to my onkyo 805. i have windows xp installed, as well as windows 7 build 7000, and have the exact same performance in each.

i know its not an issue with the cable, or receiver, or speakers because i simply unplug the hdmi cable from the back of my xbox 360 and plug it into my laptop, and i just tested my batman begins hd-dvd through the 360 and had it so loud my ears almost bled and there was no popping or cracking noises during explosions.

i have the latest k-lite codec pack installed, and use ac3filter with media player classic to play ac3 720p mkv bluray rips. i tried VLC but can't get 5.1 audio to work at all, its all jumpy and such. it seems whatever things i try in ac3filter don't do anything - like lowering the volume by 20db doesn't seem to actually do anything in media player classic.

any suggestions? sorry if there was a better place for me to pose this question.

Sounds to me that something is running out of bits, most likely a processor iin your laptop.

 

[Mooney]

anything i can do about that?? i am 90% sure i didn't have this problem at one point in time. but there is just a chance that i didn't watch anything with loud explosions. it seems anything else loud is fine, it is just explosions that cause the messed up noises.

hmm.

 

[businessjeff]

Try lowering the sound on your laptop to half or so, it may be clipping the signal your sending to the amp.

How is VLC not working? VLC is godly and can pretty much play everything, I have noticed though that when im playing my DVD's on my computer using VLC its choppy ever here and there, but thats most like my DVD rom.

It looks like VLC uses windows sounds, theres an option in VLC preferences that needs to be checked in order for it to use SPDIF output. Do you have realtek or audigy drivers for your on board sound? If you have realtek open the realtek sound manager and make sure that the settings are set to 5.1 and theres even test features to send a noise to each speaker to test it, as well as Ep's and all that fun stuff.

What kind of sound card do you have? If its just on-board then, who's it made by?

 

[Mooney]

Try lowering the sound on your laptop to half or so, it may be clipping the signal your sending to the amp.

that's the problem, no matter what i attempt to change on my laptop, either in ac3filter or in wmc or simply the volume slider it doesn't seem to affect the sound at all. i don't know if its because its spdif, or what, i don't really know much about it. do i need spdif for 5.1 sound through hdmi? as far i know spdif pretty much IS how 5.1 is transfered digitally, is it not?

the drivers for my laptop audio from dell are sigmatel. i don't think its a driver issue, because i am getting the exact same issues on xp with ancient drivers, as well as on windows7 with up to date vista drivers.

 

[Mooney]

but to further explain, ive watched many a drama in 5.1 quite loud, with no problems. its just when i went to watch the dark knight bluray rip, and subsequently other action movies, if i want to watch them at loud to excessively loud volumes i get the cracking popping noise during explosions.

it would seem just like the levels sent from my laptop are too high, but i can't seem to change the spdif output from my laptop no matter what i try.

 

[businessjeff]

Ohh so your volume control isnt working, that would tell me that your setup is overriding windows sound, to use your sound card direct. It probably has somethign to do with this ac3 filter.

Spdif was just a type of output as far as I knew, im no expert though.

Well if your just using a single stereo signal to carry a Dolby encoded sound wave then the the dolby encoding is whats deciphers the signal to determine what goes where in a 5.1 system, thats the whole point of dolby. It encodes it on one end (your pc) then decodes is at the other end (your amp)

Where as if you have a 5.1 or 7.1 channel sound card then you would have a center/sub output, front l/r output and a rear l/r output. In 7.1 then you would have a 4th side l/r output. Dolby decoding would then take the sound file from the dvd and send it accordingly.

You should be using your windows sound to utilize your sound card. And I bet you thats where your problem lies. Sometimes you do want to bypass windows sound to use the sound card and most programs have built their own drivers to do so, as in the case of ASIO drivers. However for what your doing you should be AOK with windows sound.

I dont see any preferences in windows media player or VLC to choose which sound drivers to use. So I would go into, control panel > Sounds and Audio properties, under the audio tab what device is it set to use?

I would suggest to simplify all of this to figure out if you have a realtek chipset for your sound, if so its either going to use AC97 drivers or HD drivers. I would download new ones and reinstall them, hopefully that would undo this other driver set you got going on, and solve your sound issue.

Whats the make and model number of your laptop?

EDIT: Hehe laptop model is in the OP

 

[businessjeff]

which dell is it?

http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&cat=prod&k=m1330&rpp=12&p=1&subcat=sys%2fnotebooks%2fxpsnb&rf=all&nk=f&ira=False&~srd=False&ipsys=False&advsrch=False

 

[Mooney]

i don't think it's either, specifically. i bought it ten months ago. i do know that i optioned for the nvidia 8400 card, or whatever.

i think i may have fixed the problem. i uninstalled ac3filter, and the k-lite codec pack, then reinstalled vlc. i changed the audio output to 'waveout' or something along those lines. this fixed the messed up 5.1 playback from before. and lowering the volume in vlc now seems to fix the problem. thanks for your help, folks.

 

[businessjeff]

Now you should be back on the windows sound through VLC and Windows Media Player, that codec pack you got was bypassing windows sound and using your soundcard directly thus causing problem.

Somtimes you want to do this though, when I was trying to output 5.1 in Adobe soundbooth windows sound wouldnt recognize nothing more than 2 channels, so I used a neat driver set called ASIO free for all, and this used my sound card directly and allowed me to output 5.1 in the program.

Adobe itself makes drivers like the ASIO for all, but those didnt work either. ASIO drivers use to only be made for soundcards that you buy and not onboard cards that are integrated. Thanks to the ASIO free for all though, they work for just about every sound card out there.