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Odd Soundcard Issue / Broken?

L

lmnop

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 12, 2006
Messages
74
Hello,

I ran into a situation this morning and was looking for some feedback on what happened. I was listening to my headphones (Sennheiser HD598) plugged into my pc's PCI sound card (Asus Xonar DG). I went to take my headphones off and there was a static electricity type shock that happened when I touched my hand to the right side of the headphones. I set the headphones down and did not think anything of it.

About an hour later I was back at my PC and put my headphones back on and I noticed a static/feedback in my right ear. I thought maybe the headphones were damaged, but then I unplugged them and tried a pair of earbuds in the same jack on the Asus Xonar DG and got the same results, static in the right ear.

Does this seem like a plausible thing to happen? Somehow the static shock damaged the audio jack/sound card?

I pulled the card out and I am now using my motherboard's (P8Z68-V Pro) on-board sound. There doesn't appear to be any other "damage" to my system.

As an additional question, is it worth it to get a new PCI soundcard? I think the Xonar DG was maybe 30 bucks when I bought it 2 years ago. I'm not even sure if it is "better" than my motherboard's onboard?

Any input is appreciated, thanks.
 
If it did the same thing with two different sets of 'phones, it likely is/was the card...no idea what could have caused that kind of a shock (heavy carpeting?), but if you actually got zapped all bets are pretty much off.

On the bright side, replacing a Xonar DG won't be too hard nowadays (and if you're using halfway decent headphones like Sennheisers, unless you literally can't tell the difference between onboard and the old DG's sound you will want to replace it). You can easily get another DG for about $30 or so (and depending on when you bought the original DG it may still be covered by Asus' three-year warranty), or something a little better if you go PCIe.
 
Thanks for the reply.
Right before I took my headphones off I did remove a goose down blanket I had on, so that probably had something to do with it. It just seems so odd the card would get messed up. I thought if anything maybe the headphones would get damaged. The shock didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary to me. Hopefully the actual PCI slot, or something else, isn't damaged. So far everything seems to be normal.

I plan on ordering another Asus Xonar DG to replace it.
 
Odds are if the slot itself were damaged the card would be acting up a lot more than with one weird audio channel--or not being detected at all. (Depending on your level of paranoia, however, if you can borrow somebody else's card you can be absolutely sure.) If the current DG is just two years old, as said earlier you might well be able to save yourself some money and RMA the thing under warranty. Check its serial number with Asus.
 
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