Sound issue with Lite-On CD player and audio CD's

[Ken Springer]

I'm doing a complete reinstall of XP Home on a 6 year old computer.
When I play an audio or video CD in the CD Rom, there's a problem.

If it's just audio, there is a distinct tick, tick, tick, reminiscent of
a crack or scratch on a vinyl record (for those that actually remember
what records are! LOL). If it's video with sound, such as a WMV file,
the ticks becomes a quick staccato sound of less than half a second.

Online chatting with the drive maker was no help. They use the Windows
drivers, they do not have their own drivers for this unit. Or, so they
say. If the drivers exist, I haven't found them online as of yet.

All XP updates except for the card reading keyboard are installed. For
some of the optional updates, such as the ATI graphics adapter, I
installed drivers from the manufacturer's site, not Microsoft Update.

The CD Rom is the slave drive, and jumpered as such. The master drive
is a DVD burning unit, and jumpered as such.

I have a request into MSI, motherboard supplier, asking where I can find
the latest drivers for the motherboard, but haven't heard back from them.

So far, I've tried:

1. Larger power supply
2. Different CD Rom, the problem still exists
3. Different sound card
4. A variety of discs


EMachine T6212, I do not have the factory discs for this computer.
1.5GB of RAM.
Lite-On CD-ROM LTN-489S (slave)
Sony DVD RW DRU-810a, latest firmware installed


I have not tried a 3rd CD Rom player as of yet.

Anyone have any thoughts and/or suggestions?


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 7.0.1
Thunderbird 7.0.1
LibreOffice 3.3.4

 

[Paul]

I'm doing a complete reinstall of XP Home on a 6 year old computer. When
I play an audio or video CD in the CD Rom, there's a problem.

If it's just audio, there is a distinct tick, tick, tick, reminiscent of
a crack or scratch on a vinyl record (for those that actually remember
what records are! LOL). If it's video with sound, such as a WMV file,
the ticks becomes a quick staccato sound of less than half a second.

Online chatting with the drive maker was no help. They use the Windows
drivers, they do not have their own drivers for this unit. Or, so they
say. If the drivers exist, I haven't found them online as of yet.

All XP updates except for the card reading keyboard are installed. For
some of the optional updates, such as the ATI graphics adapter, I
installed drivers from the manufacturer's site, not Microsoft Update.

The CD Rom is the slave drive, and jumpered as such. The master drive
is a DVD burning unit, and jumpered as such.

I have a request into MSI, motherboard supplier, asking where I can find
the latest drivers for the motherboard, but haven't heard back from them.

So far, I've tried:

1. Larger power supply
2. Different CD Rom, the problem still exists
3. Different sound card
4. A variety of discs


EMachine T6212, I do not have the factory discs for this computer. 1.5GB
of RAM.
Lite-On CD-ROM LTN-489S (slave)
Sony DVD RW DRU-810a, latest firmware installed


I have not tried a 3rd CD Rom player as of yet.

Anyone have any thoughts and/or suggestions?

I tried a search on Ebay for "Emachines T6212 motherboard" and got specs
for it in a table on the first hit. Using that table, the table appears
to be the same as this one. It's an S939 motherboard with SB400 Southbridge
(an ATI chipset).

http://support.gateway.com/s/MOTHERBD/MSI/103171/103171sp2.shtml

Sound is "RealTek ALC658C 6-channel, AC-97".

You go to RealTek, to get their driver package. This would allow you
to reinstall the sound.

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads...=23&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

When MSI makes an OEM motherboard for Emachines, they're under no obligation
to have a web page for it. Emachines is supposed to provide the downloads.
So you'd have to figure out, who owns Emachines now, and where are the
downloads.

In some cases, an OEM motherboard also exists as a retail version, and then
support does exist. But by tradition, an OEM board does not have to match
any retail version, and consequently you're then at the mercy of the computer
maker for your drivers.

There is an example of a page here, but you can poke around this site
and see if there is a better page. Does Gateway own Emachines ? I
can't keep track of that stuff, too much of a circus.

http://support.gateway.com/s//MOTHERBD/MSI/103171/103171nv.shtml

*******

In terms of BIOS settings, on older motherboards the "Delayed Transaction" setting
could be enabled, to remove "underrun noise" from the sound subsystem. The
PCI latency setting was another one. If set too high, like 64 or 128, some
of those old motherboards would "starve" the onboard sound when it needed
samples. I had to carefully tune one motherboard, to almost eliminate
that effect.

On more modern motherboards, those settings have been done for you, and there's
really "nothing to see" in the BIOS. It's the much older boards, where some
BIOS tuning helped.

I had to use this archived copy of the Techarp article on Delayed Transaction,
as their site isn't working properly right now. This discusses what enabling
Delayed Transaction used to do. On modern motherboards, enabled is the
default setting, which is why we don't need to worry about it any more.

http://web.archive.org/web/20100812063216/http://www.techarp.com/showFreeBOG.aspx?lang=0&bogno=58

Paul

 

[Ken Springer]

Hi, Paul

I tried a search on Ebay for "Emachines T6212 motherboard" and got specs
for it in a table on the first hit. Using that table, the table appears
to be the same as this one. It's an S939 motherboard with SB400 Southbridge
(an ATI chipset).

http://support.gateway.com/s/MOTHERBD/MSI/103171/103171sp2.shtml

A better page, IMO, is here:
http://www.e4allupgraders.info/dir1/motherboards/socket939/msi7093.shtml

While the above page says there are 8 USB ports, eMachine used two of
those ports for card reading.

That website seems to be a huge wealth of info for eMachines, and links
to a user discussion forum. I'm still waiting for administrator
approval to post.

Sound is "RealTek ALC658C 6-channel, AC-97".

You go to RealTek, to get their driver package. This would allow you
to reinstall the sound.

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads...=23&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

I've got everything going except for this CD Rom noise problem and no
driver for the SM Bus controller. Looking for the SM Bus controller was
the reason for a request to MSI.

There's an official eMachine BIOS update on the page, I'm undecided on
installing it. Don't want to mess with something that is not causing
any known problem.

When MSI makes an OEM motherboard for Emachines, they're under no obligation
to have a web page for it. Emachines is supposed to provide the downloads.
So you'd have to figure out, who owns Emachines now, and where are the
downloads.

In some cases, an OEM motherboard also exists as a retail version, and then
support does exist. But by tradition, an OEM board does not have to match
any retail version, and consequently you're then at the mercy of the computer
maker for your drivers.

There is an example of a page here, but you can poke around this site
and see if there is a better page. Does Gateway own Emachines ? I
can't keep track of that stuff, too much of a circus.

http://support.gateway.com/s//MOTHERBD/MSI/103171/103171nv.shtml

Gateway owns eMachines, and in turn Gateway is owned by Acer. And to be
blunt, Gateway/eMachine support for legacy units sucks. :-(

*******

In terms of BIOS settings, on older motherboards the "Delayed Transaction" setting
could be enabled, to remove "underrun noise" from the sound subsystem. The
PCI latency setting was another one. If set too high, like 64 or 128, some
of those old motherboards would "starve" the onboard sound when it needed
samples. I had to carefully tune one motherboard, to almost eliminate
that effect.

The default PCI latency setting is 64 for this board.

On more modern motherboards, those settings have been done for you, and there's
really "nothing to see" in the BIOS. It's the much older boards, where some
BIOS tuning helped.

I had to use this archived copy of the Techarp article on Delayed Transaction,
as their site isn't working properly right now. This discusses what enabling
Delayed Transaction used to do. On modern motherboards, enabled is the
default setting, which is why we don't need to worry about it any more.

http://web.archive.org/web/20100812063216/http://www.techarp.com/showFreeBOG.aspx?lang=0&bogno=58

--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 7.0.1
Thunderbird 7.0.1
LibreOffice 3.3.4

 

[Paul]

Looking for the SM Bus controller was the reason for a request to MSI.

That was a bit difficult to track down.

I used the mobot, to try to find some other boards with SB400 (as SMBUS is
an interface on the Southbridge), but the mobot entries were inaccurate.
For example, Asus tried to avoid SB400, and used a ULI Southbridge instead.
When I did find a manufacturer, offering a "chipset driver", it was a VGA
driver for the graphics in the Northbridge.

On this ECS page, the "RAID" driver, hides an SMBUS driver inside. Fortunately,
they list the contents of the package on the download page. Otherwise, it
would mean many hours of boring blind downloading looking for the stupid thing.
The driver includes RAID as well as SMBUS.

http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Pr...ilID=536&DetailName=Feature&MenuID=24&LanID=0

Now, after all of that, it doesn't appear to install any files. It makes
registry changes, and does something to a service, presumably to make it
"go away".

http://download.ecsusa.com/dlfileecs/driver/mb/raid/ati/ATIsb.zip

sb460\win3264\smbus
smbusati.cat
smbusati.inf

%ATI.DeviceDesc0% = ATISMBus, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4353
%ATI.DeviceDesc0% = ATISMBus, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4363
%ATI.DeviceDesc0% = ATISMBus, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4372
%ATI.DeviceDesc0% = ATISMBus, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4385

You could try an INF install (right-click the .inf and select "Install" from the menu),
and see if that completes the installation. I wouldn't run the installer
at the top level for this, due to side effects.

If I look in the PCI.IDS database, and look at the adjacent entries to
these, you can get some idea what Southbridges are covered by that "blank" install.
Each of the lines I snipped out here, is separated by many other lines, so
you won't find these lines exactly next to one another.

http://pciids.sourceforge.net/pci.ids

1002 ATI Technologies Inc
4353 SMBus
4363 SMBus
4372 IXP SB400 SMBus Controller
4385 SBx00 SMBus Controller

Anyway, you could go back to the Gateway site, and see if they have a
"RAID" driver and get the SMBUS out of there (assuming it's packaged
in a similar way). The .cat above, as far as I know, that has something
to do with signing the package, while the INF does the installing. And
because there appears to be no included file list in the INF, not even
an #INCLUDE call to a built-in Microsoft driver, there doesn't appear
to be anything of substance involved. Just reg entries and text strings
to make Device Manager look pretty.

*******

As for MSI, they have a LiveUpdate software you can install. I installed
it once, to update a driver for one of their video cards. I uninstalled it
immediately after, to avoid any "calling home" later. While they do offer
manual examination of their web pages, for finding drivers, the cupboard
looked pretty empty. There is no guarantee though, that LiveUpdate will
find a match. If it uses a BIOS model number string for example, and searches
that way, it might not find a match. It probably isn't based on enumerating
hardware and finding the drivers that way (like 1002:4372) - more likely
to try to match motherboard name to driver packages. And the BIOS string
is one way to do that.

Paul

 

[dadiOH]

I'm doing a complete reinstall of XP Home on a 6 year old computer.
When I play an audio or video CD in the CD Rom, there's a problem.

If it's just audio, there is a distinct tick, tick, tick, reminiscent
of a crack or scratch on a vinyl record (for those that actually
remember what records are! LOL). If it's video with sound, such as
a WMV file, the ticks becomes a quick staccato sound of less than
half a second.

This is a very long shot but FWIW I had similar problems several years ago.
Turned out to be a software cooler that was the culprit.

--

dadiOH
____________________________

dadiOH's dandies v3.06...
....a help file of info about MP3s, recording from
LP/cassette and tips & tricks on this and that.
Get it at http://mysite.verizon.net/xico

 

[Ken Springer]

On 10/29/11 2:16 AM, Paul wrote:

http://download.ecsusa.com/dlfileecs/driver/mb/raid/ati/ATIsb.zip

Paul, if we should ever meet, there's a steak dinner on me!

This worked like a champ. Extracted and ran setup, dialogue window said
it was installing the SM Bus driver, and all is now well. No more ugly
yellow question marks in Device Manager!

<snip>

Now, if an answer to the CD Rom ticking sound, I can give this system
away to my friend and not have to hang my head in shame! LOL

Other than burning a couple CD of the software I installed, and printing
some helpful hints type of paperwork, that's the only thing left to solve.

--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 7.0.1
Thunderbird 7.0.1
LibreOffice 3.3.4

 

[Paul]

On 10/29/11 2:16 AM, Paul wrote:



Paul, if we should ever meet, there's a steak dinner on me!

This worked like a champ. Extracted and ran setup, dialogue window said
it was installing the SM Bus driver, and all is now well. No more ugly
yellow question marks in Device Manager!

<snip>

Now, if an answer to the CD Rom ticking sound, I can give this system
away to my friend and not have to hang my head in shame! LOL

Other than burning a couple CD of the software I installed, and printing
some helpful hints type of paperwork, that's the only thing left to solve.

When it comes to sound problems here, I sometimes debug them by
connecting the output of one computer, to the input of another.
Then, I can make a recording with the other computer, and look
at the kind of distortion of the waveform.

Then, it's a matter of trying various stimuli, on the source
computer, to make it easier to spot the distortion as recorded
by the other machine.

I might use Audacity to play sounds, and Sound Recorder to record
the same signal as goes to the speakers.

To detect echo problems, I use a trapezoidal pulse.

I might have Audacity create a 440Hz sine wave, when it comes to
"ticks" or "static". If there are "flat spots" on the recorded
waveform (the recorded waveform isn't all perfect sine waves),
that tells me the sound chip is suffering data underruns and is
forced to output the "old" voltage value for multiple sample
times.

If your data is being corrupted somehow, such that an audio value
of 0x00 ends up as 0x80 when it hits the speakers, that causes
a huge "spike" in the output, and it's quite easy to tell that
apart from the flat waveform type. That can give a deafening
"pop" if you have good speakers, and is much more pronounced
than ticks or static from data underruns.

So part of the fun of fixing sound, is deciding what kind of problem it is.
With the right kind of input waveform, the distortion will stand out.

*******

Assuming it's the underrun kind, we've already covered "Delayed Transaction"
and "PCI Latency" setting. The first one, cures "slow" bus cycles. The second,
if dialed down, prevents bus hogging during DMA (so all the cards get a chance
to DMA at regular intervals).

Other possible explanations, might include IRQ priority (on an older system
with PIC interrupts). Your system is a bit too new for that kind of thing.
I think my first computer was influenced by the IRQ, but the effect was so
slight, it might have been a placebo effect.

Another thing you can check, and can be a problem on modern systems, is
DPC spikes.

DPC is a deferred procedure call. It's only claim to fame in this case,
is that it allows a person to monitor whether the computer is taking any
unintentional "naps". Otherwise, we wouldn't really care about this.
If the system takes a "nap" when the sound chip needs to be serviced
and given data, that can cause noise in the audio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Procedure_Call

The DPC is timestamped, such that it is possible to figure out how
long it sat in the queue before being serviced. The time should be quite short,
in the microsecond range. DPCs were used, to complete interrupt service
routines, but at user level.

And this program, graphs the service time for the current DPC.
So if a DPC is serviced in microseconds, the graph remains low.
If the system is non-responsive for milliseconds, that makes
a big spike in the graph. Systems with spikes in the graph,
are no good for recording studio applications.

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

It might cause "ticks", if your result looked like this.

http://www.thesycon.de/dpclat/dpclat2.jpg

Now, one way to upset things, is if Cool N' Quiet is enabled. In an
Anandtech review, they noticed that video playback was slightly
smoother, if CNQ was disabled. And this was caused by the processor
changing P-states, many times a second. And that was happening, because
the time constant of bursts of computing activity for video playback,
happened to cause CNQ to switch P-states a lot. They got better
results by switching it off.

A second way to steal time from a system, is with SMM. SMM stands for
System Management Mode, and is a way for the BIOS to run code while the
OS is running. Intel invented this scheme. If the BIOS asserts an SMI,
the processor halts what it's doing, and switches over to running the SMM
code (which is BIOS code). An SMM isn't supposed to run for very long,
because if it did, it would affect time keeping on the OS.

A couple Gigabyte motherboards, possibly with Intel processors on them,
had DPC "spikes" in the graph the above tool makes. And it was a BIOS problem.
Once Gigabyte was informed their SMM code was running too long, they
issued a new BIOS with it fixed. SMM code is sometimes used to adjust
the number of running phases on a fancy VCore switching converter.
It's a gimmick that claims to save wall power, by only using as
many phases as are necessary to generate VCore.

So to test, you download and run DPCLat, then look at the graph.
It is OK to have the occasional spike - for example, if I start
a 3D game, there is a *huge* spike when the video card switches
to 3D mode. But that's to be expected, because a lot is happening
at driver level at the time. And if textures are being loaded,
the DMA transfer at 4GB a second the video card can be doing,
can make a dent in the system for a fraction of a second. So if
you see the occasional spike, it's not the end of the world.
But if you see a repetitive pulsing, you'd want to track that
down. On an AMD system, you can disable Cool N' Quiet and see
if anything changes.

When it comes to SMM mode, there isn't much you can do there,
except try another BIOS version. With pre-built computers, many
of them never receive a second BIOS (i.e. any kind of update),
so that isn't an option.

Paul

 

[Ken Springer]

I have not tried a 3rd CD Rom player as of yet.

Finally did this, solved the problem. The 2nd CD unit I installed
*supposedly* worked fine, according to the original owner.

Never give up, keep on trying!


--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 7.0.1
Thunderbird 7.0.1
LibreOffice 3.3.4