Static/white noise on earphones (Studio XPS 1640)

I hear white noise / static noise (whatever is the proper term for that) when using headphones with Studio XPS 1640. It is most audible when no sound or music is being played from the laptop. I'm not if it has something to do with the type of headphones that I am using (I have two sets of Creative earphones that I got together with my XPS M1210 and 1530).

Anybody else having this issue?

 

I have it with my 1330 aswell i beleive it has to do with drivers or something

 

I don't think the drivers are causing it. I can hear some noise even before Windows boots up.

 

I have a M1330 and the noise disappears if put load on the CPU.

The differences in the current consumption between active C0 CPU states and the low power C3/C4 states cause the so called CPU whining due to the inverse piezo effect. Unfortunately you can hear that on the sound jacks too. That being said "Option 4" in ii) CPU/Chipset Whining Stop - choices and side effects of
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=276661
helps to prevent the noise. Im not sure whether "Option 3 + 2" still works on the Centrino 2 plattform. There are known incompatibilities and RMClock 2.35 hasn't been updated.

This is just for testing purpose - you'll raise CPU power consumption with any of the above mentioned things. Once you know where the noise comes from - you may thing of other methods.

 

I'm not having CPU whine.

I googled about this and found some threads that say the noise heard from using headphones connected to the laptop's jacks is caused by interference from other signals due to poor shielding of the jack itself.

I'm just wondering if other 1640 users are having this issue or not, so I can raise this with Dell itself for repair if necessary.

 

i have this with my m1530. havent really bothered with it since i always have music playing

 

But you could still put load on the CPU and test it, since the big differences in power consumption do also have an impact on "bad shielding". However I'm very curious about how those google-guys can tell whether the noise comes from bad shielding or from noise on the VCC lines for the sound codec.

 

Here's what I found:

For 1640 users:

Are you having this noise issue with headphones plugged to 1640?

 

I had the "morse-code" interference over headphones on my 1700 which was solved by isolating the metal casing of the jack assembly from the metal tabs on the palm rest used to support the jacks, which push down on the jack assembly from above.

 

im not sure..but there will always be some noise
unless you use digital output..right?

 

Probably electrical interference; the headphone jack is right on the MB and unshielded.. i would expect too much from it.

 

bump for 1640 users

 

no white noise here

 

...up............