Of irritating speaker distortion and School Certificate exams
Well that was one of the most annoying experiences to deal with. For the last few days, noticeably ever since I installed a copy of Halo: Combat Evolved, my speakers have been going wonky. I own a pair of Logitech speakers, which came with a sub-woofer. The sub-woofer began to act really odd after awhile so it sits as an ornament below my desk, but the speakers are still perfectly fine and in good condition. Lately though, distortion has been really high, guitars become crackly and vocals near non-existent. I had recently ripped a Communic album to my PC, and holy shit, the distortion on their songs was like an insane crackling of death.
Speaking of insane cracklings of death, a friend of mine once recommended I listen to the black/gothic/heavy metal band, Anorexia Nervosa. When I visited their Myspace for a sample or two, this sudden burst of static popped over my speakers. I had thought my speakers were broken or something and began examining it then I realized how stupid I was, or more importantly how insanely unmusical and heavy Anorexia Nervosa’s music was. I never listened to that guy’s music recommendations ever again. I’ll definitely stick to Last.FM for such things. Besides I don’t even listen to Black or Gothic metal. Just good old non-mainstream progressive metal.
This next part is going to be pretty much filled with tech stuff and me waffling on…
Anyway so I had to bear with the crappy distorted noises for about a week. My whole iTunes library had been rendered unenjoyable, except for the softer or more instrumental songs I have. I first suspected it was the speakers, but after playing the same album with the speakers connected to a CD player and getting a clean sound, it was obvious the problem was software based. I looked about on the internet, flicked through article after article, tried all sorts of different things and today I decided to do something more drastic. I first updated my sound drivers after a lengthy and annoying search and following about through FAQ’s and guides into ‘Identifying your chipset’, ‘Identifying your Southbridge’ and such and after that I decided to take a punt and download the driver (there were two possible ones to choose from and about four others which were just there for some reason, I took a guess). I had very serious doubts about this fixing my problem, my theory was that the driver may ‘override’ the settings on the previous version of the driver and thus return everything back to default. It did in fact do this (to an extent) but it had no effect whatsoever. At least it didn’t screw up my audio completely and force me into rolling back my drivers.
Anyway a more drastic step was to unscrew my computer’s casing and check about and perhaps clean the place of dust that may somehow be affecting the sound. My PC is quite old, very old perhaps five, six or maybe even seven years old? So that meant it used one of the old cases where you had to unscrew everything to get to the insides. After some cleaning of dust and finding out I really couldn’t identify the sound card because it was fully integrated. I pretty much gave up.
I was frustrated, all this effort and time wasted. I started up my PC after reconnecting it and eventually went about checking over some of the audio settings and such. I turned on some Communic, just to see if any of that had made a slight difference. Nothing. I had passed through every available menu, sub menu and advanced option panel to do with audio, nothing could help. I for the hundreth time then glazed through the array of menus once more until I came upon a certain part in ‘Sound and Audio properties’. I checked over the new driver to examine if it had been properly registered and installed and glazed over the settings it had changed. Nothing of any help. Then I clicked on an ‘Advanced’ tab and eventually clicked another ‘Advanced’ tab and came to a menu I had entered quite a few times during my search for the solution, the ‘Advanced controls for 3D depth’, I for no apparent reason or thought unclicked a check box saying ‘3D Stereo Enhancement’ that was in the menu. Suddenly the distorted music that was playing returned to it’s old former self.
Well just as I had expected it was a software problem, some stupid setting I had changed for no apparent reason on the same day, or around the same time as I installed Halo. Ah it’s great to have decent audio again.
Alright enough of that, oh yeah and I better reinstall Halo, I had suspected it might have had something to do with the problem because the audio screwup occurred at the same time as I installed it. But looks like good old Halo is quite fine…
Anyway yesterday, I sat for the school certificate Geography and History course. Civics and Citizenship. This was my final ‘exam’ although the yearlies ended more than a week ago. Well after this I would have to do no more study or anything else related to marks or assessments. Only a quarter of my grade sat the exam, because it was mainly intended for Year 10’s and those 30 of us had been selected for the accelerated course. As we were told, and as I expected the exam was ridiculously easy, although in an essay on human rights which we had done little on, I fluffed most of it. But overall the whole thing was quite simple. No the only real thing to do is just sit and wait for reports. End of year, term four is always great. Just nothing to worry about whatsoever.
Well that’s that really. I would probably right an essay or something on a more interesting topic next time but I really should get away from the computer having spent the majority of the afternoon tinkering with it.
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