Headphone trouble...

Hello everyone,

This problem has been happening for a long time now... Whenever I plug headphones into my laptop, I get a tv-static-like noise, or little beeps, or little fuzzes. This has been happening with three types of my headphones, one is a regular headphone by Philips, two is the iPod earphones, three is my recording Sony headphones that cost a fortune... And I tried on three different laptops, and I always get the static noise. One is my dell Latitude, two is my IBM Thinkpad, three is my Dell Vostro.
I tried plugging the same headphones into my desktop and there's no noise.
Any idea what's wrong and how I can fix it?


Thanks

 

The quality of the soundcard I guess, also maybe the resistance of the headphones.

First things to do would be make sure you have the newest sound drivers. From there I am not really sure...

 

I would try updating the sound drivers as was mentioned. I find it hard to imagine there would be three bad headphone jacks on three different laptop unless you are very rough on them. I guess its possible all three could have poorly grounded heaphone jacks to.

 

Poorly grounded jacks might be possible on the cheap Vostro, but definitely not the Latitude or Thinkpad... I'll try updating the driver and see.

 

Sound card drivers are all up-to-date...

 

Do you hear the sound always or only at high volume? Because i think static on high volume is normal for onboard sound. I get it too using both my genius HS-04a headphones and my altec lansing AVS300 speakers, altough both were pretty cheap, which might explain it.

 

Nope. I turned off the sound completely, and I still hear the sound when I plug in the headphones. Also, this only happens with headphones, there's no problem when I plug my speakers in... So I think I might have 3 defective headphones...

 

That might be normal. I can't remember the last time I did it, but when there was absolutely no sound playing I could hear those fuzzy or wavy noises. Will have to check when I get back.

 

If its the headphones tho how could it work on the desktop flawlessly? You sort of eliminated that possibility.

@ mythless awesome avatar Portagus D Ace

 

Well, it's not the headphone jack's fault because it works fine when I plug in my Logitech speakers... It's not the headphones fault because they work on desktops, iPods, and other devices... Maybe the laptop headphone jack doesn't provide enough voltage/current?

 

Yeah thats what I meant by the resistance, some high end headphones have a high resistance (ohm's) but stuff like your ipod headphones defiantly wont be like that.

 

That is the reason I returned my 1520, that thing had horrible static noises coming from it. So, I went out to a store and tried out many headphone jacks - while none had static noises as bad as 1520, many laptops had that noise to varying degrees, although none of them as bad as 1520. MacBook Pro, had it pretty bad- not good considering its price, well anyway. As far as I understand, headphones/earphones tend to be sensitive. However, I had a cheap "AV" headphone which almost entirely shut off noises from 1520 - I assume that thing was made for "noisy" signals, and maybe same thing can be said for logitech speakers.

This is one of the reason I bought Vaio FZ, as sound coming out of its headphone jack was miles above other laptop I tried (which doesn't say a lot, I admit). If you like to listen to music from laptop, you may want to invest in a good USB sound box or add-on sound card.