sound cards dying- help!

[jpangelo]

OK, need help again.... my soundcards are dying after about 20 days or so....

I have had 2 ASUS Xonar DG cards die on me, one new from Amazon (they accepted the return) and 1 I had in another box, around a year old.

I'm using them in an old 939 system as a sound generator, playing a 16Khz tone with WMP, 10 sec on 20 sec off, to keep screaming bluejays away. It's been working great- the birds are silent, I can smoke my cigars in peace.

But the cards die after about 20 days or so.

I'm using the 1/8" green jack line-out to an old Yamaha stereo amplifier, and nothing else is showing errors. This morning I noticed bird noise again, checked my super tweeters, no sound from them. Sound card verified dead.

Is the frequency (16Khz) too high for this cheap card to continuously reproduce?

Can anyone help with what is killing these cards? The system is otherwise fine, all PCI slots check out fine, other expansion cards work with no problem in there, etc.

Can anyone suggest a sound card that might be better able to cope with what I'm doing here? I didn't know playing a simple tone would stress the card so much... no other part of the PC shows stress- no high CPU temp, no high PSU load, etc.

Thanks for any help!

 

[dandragonrage]

Literally no frequency should cause damage. Not 1Hz, not 100kHz. You will simply be subject to the limited frequency response of your gear (which of course isn't going to allow 1Hz or 100kHz to be audible - but they shouldn't burn anything up). Unfortunately however I can't tell you what the issue with your cards could be.

Can you not hear that 16kHz tone? That would annoy me a lot more than any amount of birds.