Sound glitch with SPDIF - Please help!

[koku]

I'm hoping some of you HCPC bods can help me...

There's a really irritating sound glitch when viewing DVDs on my PC. The glitch only occurs when using the SPDIF output on my Creative 5.1 Live! card through PowerDVD3.0, all other audio options work just fine (thought they don't give 'true' 5.1 sound).

The glitch lasts less than a second, occurs every 2 minutes or so and when an actor is speaking it makes him/her sound like he/she has a stammer. It's so brief that sometimes it's possible to miss it when no one is talking on screen.

I've tried updating all the drivers possible for m/board, soundcard, graphics card etc. but none of these affect the problem either way. I've also tried my sound card in all available bays in the m/board, as per Creative's online assistance, still no dice.

Can anyone assist as this is really frustrating!
Here are my system's specs:
AMD Athlon 1.47Ghz w/768MB DDR Ram
Creative 5.1 Live! s/card w/Cambridge Soundworks 5.1 speakers
nVidia GeForce2Ti g/card
PowerDVD3.0

Thanks for any and all replies,
David

[MAW]

It's almost certainly another prog. using processor power, espec. internet. Are you on broadband? could be windows update, antivirus, something like that. CTRL-ALT-DEL and see what's running, quit everything except explorer and systray and poss sctray if you're using 2ndchance, and try that. If that doesn't fix it, you may need to see what's loading at startup, which is found by typing 'msconfig' in the 'run' dialogue box, and clicking on the 'startup' tab. See if you can make any sense of that, with all due caution about what you stop running.....

[koku]

Thanks MAW, will try that when I get home tonight.

I'm not on broadband with that particular machine (in fact I've never used the internet on it) but the glitch is very irritating and I have too many DVDs to watch this Xmas!

Will post an update when I get the chance, thanks again for the sugggestions.

[Gary Lightfoot]

if it's on a network that may affect it too.

I have to make sure my network connection is disconnected or the other pc is off if I'm to watch a movie on my htpc.

If I don't, it has a small noticable stuutter in the video every few minutes.

Gary.

[MAW]

For just the same reasons as internet, the network checks itself every few minutes. I'm happy to say mine doesn't suffer, I use mine connected to a network and broadband the whole time, but more than 1/2 the ones I've seen must be disconnected from everything to work smoothly. Antivirus software is often suspect too.

[koku]

UPDATE: I took your advice MAW and disabled Norton, ran msconfig taking out every application that didn't need to be running and it still happens...

Is it significant that the glitch only affects the SPDIF output? I can play discs in Wave Out, Dolby Surround, Expander and regular stereo, all of which faithfully reproduce sound.

Not really wishing to but would tweaking the I/O settings and/or port allocations mke any difference? I did check that there are no device conflicts on my system...

Any other ideas would be most gratefully received!

Thanks,
David

[MAW]

It may well be significant about it being just SPDIF, in that case. Just wondering if it's using the decoder in the speakers causing it. Just one more PC thing, check your output is set to 48khz, the factory default is 44.1khz, for PCM. Though that normally just causes a degradation of the overall sound, it's just possible it might do that, especially if the glitch was actually occurring in the decoder stage, not in the PC. After that I'm fresh out of ideas, apart from ditch the soundcard. There's a philips one highly spoken of that's about £30, but it'd be best to borrow a mate's different card and try that before spending any hard earned. You haven't had to spend any money to try things so far, try everything else before opening wallet is my motto. Any way, think how much faster and smoother your PC runs now you've cleaned out the crap!