I'm a moron

[RJM62]

So last night I was sitting at a Windows machine and decided to listen to some tunes while I was working. I clicked into "My Music," and it sounded like Karaoke. The voices were missing, and the music sounded distorted.

"Aha," I said, "Microsoft must have sent me some evil DRM code." So I uninstalled WMP 11. No joy.

"I must need new sound drivers," I thought. But there were no newer ones available.

"Okay, maybe I need old sound drivers," I thought, and rolled back the drivers. No improvement.

"I know," I said, "It must be that dialup voice modem I installed for the answering system." So I uninstalled the modem. No go. Sound was still distorted.

"Maybe there are some system files that were replaced," I thought, and so I did a system restore. No luck.

"Must be the sound card," I decided. By then it was 3 a.m., and I was searching through my pile of junk for a sound card that would work with all of the operating systems installed on the computer. Couldn't find one.

I was about to grab one out of the truck when I absent-mindely moved the balance slider... and realized that it wasn't working. The sound still came out both sides regardless of the slider position , but the voices returned when I slid to either extreme.

So I flipped the switch from headphone to speakers, and the sound worked fine. Turns out the insulation in the headset wire wore out somewhere and probably created a capacitor that happened to filter out the range of human voice, and distorted some other frequencies.

Hey, I can't complain. That Plantronics headset outlasted three computers. So I bought a new one today for thirty bucks. Problem solved.

Rich

 

[KennyFlys]

Aren't you glad you didn't spend all that troubleshooting time on a client's machine while they're watching the clock tick?

 

[RJM62]

LOL, that's exactly what I thought when I realized what had happened.

Rich

 

[CJones]

Ahh.. The infamous balance setting. As a recovering live-sound engineer using 50+ channel mixing consoles, I can tell you to always look for the VERY obvious things first. I once chased a signal from mic to board to eq to compressor to amp to speaker, through three snakes b/c the signal wasn't balanced -- I assumed it was a bad connection somewhere -- turned out that I had inadvertently bumped the balance knob while pre-show setup.

Another thing to check when stuff like this happens is to make sure the plug is in COMPLETELY. Sometimes there is one more little 'click' necessary to get the TRS fittings touching everywhere correctly. The plug might only have to go in another 1/64" to make things work right.

Funny, though..

 

[RJM62]

Ahh.. The infamous balance setting. As a recovering live-sound engineer using 50+ channel mixing consoles, I can tell you to always look for the VERY obvious things first. I once chased a signal from mic to board to eq to compressor to amp to speaker, through three snakes b/c the signal wasn't balanced -- I assumed it was a bad connection somewhere -- turned out that I had inadvertently bumped the balance knob while pre-show setup.

Another thing to check when stuff like this happens is to make sure the plug is in COMPLETELY. Sometimes there is one more little 'click' necessary to get the TRS fittings touching everywhere correctly. The plug might only have to go in another 1/64" to make things work right.

Funny, though..

What makes it funnier is that my original training was in electronics, not I.T. Yet I spent hours looking for some reason other than the obvious why the human voice frequencies were being attenuated.

Back when I worked in a TV studio in the 1980's, the first thing I would have done would have been to check for a bad cable somewhere along the line (assuming the balance and eQ settings were okay). But as the computers are getting smarter, I'm getting stupider. A bad cable is still a bad cable.

I think I'll go scrounge up some transistors, caps, resistors, and diodes and build something analog. Time to get back to basics for a while.

Rich