Weird random/intermittent audio issue

Audio Hardware & Software
1

I am having a weird audio issue that only happens randomly with my computer. No set time or thing causes it to happen it is completely random. It seemed to only start once I went to a Panasonic SC-HTB200 soundbar.

The issue is a random audio slow down. When this happens it will sound like someone suddenly set audio to half speed or something. When this happens it will also slow down any video or game that is playing and will show stuttering lag in the mouse curser and the system fans will increase slightly in rpm. This phenomenon only lasts a couple of seconds.

System temperature is fine, my system never gets hot even under load. My fans never really ramp up much as everything is very quiet.

The sound bar is connected via optical cable into the motherboard and changing to a slightly higher quality cable did improve things but the phenomenon remains.

All drivers are up to date.

I have had it happen a couple of times where it froze the whole system and restarted itself.

I am just wanting to rule out possible causes before I go buying speakers that were made for PC use rather than a tv soundbar.

I don’t want to buy a higher quality cable or maybe a sound card or other things if they are not going to solve the problem.

2

SPDIF (Optical) is unidirectional so it’s not caused by your soundbar. It’s likely a driver and/or software issue of some kind. If you have RGB-software installed and running that’s probably where your issue lies.

1 Like
3

I do not have any RGB in my computer at all. So that can’t be it haha. I don’t believe it is the soundbar. I believe it is the way the computer is trying to talk to the soundbar.

Replacing the soundbar would only be to replace it with something the computer would be happy cooperating with.

4

That’s not the soundbar causing it, it’s someone related to your computer either software and/or hardware.

5

I agree. Here is my reason for mentioning the soundbar. It never happened before when using my monitors speakers that I used to use. It only appeared when I started using the soundbar.

6

Does this happen when you use a different source? IE using a usb audio, a speaker out, or a hdmi?

7

Ok So prior to my soundbar I used the speakers built into one of my monitors as they were pretty good. No problem at all there.

When I swapped to the soundbar via optical cable that is when it started.

8

if it started with the cable make sure you have it plugged in the right way round.
some cables are unidirectional which basically means they only work if they are plugged in with the correct end in each device.
basically swap the ends round and see if that solves it :wink:

EDITED

9

This may not be an ideal way to test but it would help to narrow things down.

I’ve used an external USB sound card device made by Startech, pretty cheap on Amazon.

It has both the Analog Outputs for audio AND an Optical output too.

It connects to any USB2 port on you computer so would be a possible way to confirm IF it is the optical connection to the sound bar or not.

Also, do you have either a Cable or Satallite service ?

If so, does the tuner box have an optical output for testing too.

May not really help determine if this is related but helps to confirm IF you hear any audio cut outs and the like.

10

Can you try a different input?

11

Check for buffer size on your audio device. If it is 128 or 256, set it to 512. If it is at 512 samples already, something else has gone wrong somewhere.