Advice needed - problem with earphone jack of computer

I decided to try to play a DVD on the computer and play the soundtrack through hi-fi No.2 via the headphone jack socket - well, I thought, the headphones work jes' fine, so this'll work. But no - well. yes, sort of. I can get the sound, but I also get a continuous crackling, sounding like the type of thing that unsuppressed electrical tools produced on your radio set in days of yore. Same result with both EAR 834 and Quad 44, regardless of which input I use. So, what's my problem, and can it be fixed?

 

what's the hardware? motherboard, sound card? windows XP? what DVD software?


until you answer these, all i can suggest is to try the line out, might help.

 

It's a Dell Inspiron laptop running on Windows 2000 Pro. What's a motherboard? I presume it has a sound card of some sort, but wouldn't have any idea what it is. The player is something called Intervideo WinDVD. What's a computer line out look like? (Yes, there are still computer dinosaurs in the world!)

But surely the point is that it doesn't crackle the headphones, which must mean that the fault has absolutely nothing to do with the computer, n'est-ce pas?

 

hmmm... i'll asume WinDVD sounds fine through headphone's so that's no longer a suspect. if it's fine with headphones it could be the cable you're using.

i'm running out of ideas.

 

Me too! Thanks, anyway, Mike, I'll see if a different cable makes a difference.

 

P.S. Curiouser and curiouser. The long cable (6M) I use doesn't like the computer at all - even with no signal coming from the computer, the speakers have this rumbly crackle. Yet plug the Sony SW radio into the same cable and it functions perfectly without a single crackle! I give up.