Audio is muffly when balance is 100 on 1&2

[rnhbs]

Heyy all so recently i got a new case and whenever i plug in my headphone in the front jack the audio is sounds echoey and muffles like underwater sounds. This stops when i tweak the 'Balance' as shown in the photo but that causes the LR sound to be all weird and mixed.

[rice guru]

1 hour ago, rnhbs said:

Heyy all so recently i got a new case and whenever i plug in my headphone in the front jack the audio is sounds echoey and muffles like underwater sounds. This stops when i tweak the 'Balance' as shown in the photo but that causes the LR sound to be all weird and mixed.

Dont use the front jack they never sound good. It's unshielded and usually pretty awful sounding

[an actual squirrel]

Classic issue that happens when the headphone cable isn't plugged in all the way and the bottom part of it isn't making contact.

[JZStudios]

You got a new case, but all the components and thus drivers are the same?

I'd double check the pins on the mobo, or continuity check the jack.

[Spuriae]

5 hours ago, rice guru said:

Dont use the front jack they never sound good. It's unshielded and usually pretty awful sounding

Often the front jack has better amplification than the back (this is the Realtek default configuration as well as the way dual op-amps are usually implemented).

 

Shielding doesn't really matter for a signal line at audio frequencies. EMI can mess with feedback loops and the digital section, but not much with anything that stays below 20kHz. Inductive effects aren't really a problem at low frequency. What things inside a case might have significant noise in the audible range? Case fan motors? USB timing frames? Everything I can think of that might make a difference should either be propagated in a differential pair or doesn't have any conductor to couple to parallel to the audio cable.

 

Heck, why shouldn't the rear audio output be worse from an EMI perspective, spending so much more time near the board's noisiest sections and having lots of parallel IO conductors right next to it, as opposed to the front audio which gets to hop away from the "noisy" board and ride a cable near the grounded chassis?

[rice guru]

3 minutes ago, Nimrodor said:

Often the front jack has better amplification than the back (this is the Realtek default configuration as well as the way dual op-amps are usually implemented).

 

Shielding doesn't really matter for a signal line at audio frequencies. EMI can mess with feedback loops and the digital section, but not much with anything that stays below 20kHz. Inductive effects aren't really a problem at low frequency. What things inside a case might have significant noise in the audible range? Case fan motors? USB timing frames? Everything I can think of that might make a difference should either be propagated in a differential pair or doesn't have any conductor to couple to parallel to the audio cable.

 

Heck, why shouldn't the rear audio output be worse from an EMI perspective, spending so much more time near the board's noisiest sections and having lots of parallel IO conductors right next to it, as opposed to the front audio which gets to hop away from the "noisy" board and ride a cable near the grounded chassis?

while it has a higher potential of being noisy out of proximity it often has a better built in dac than the one in the front panel . but either way I dont trust either audio outputs to actually seriously use them.

[rnhbs]

13 hours ago, an actual squirrel said:

Classic issue that happens when the headphone cable isn't plugged in all the way and the bottom part of it isn't making contact.

my headphone is plugged in as much as i could possibly push it without breaking the front io. could it possibly be the jack issue?

[Spuriae]

1 hour ago, rnhbs said:

my headphone is plugged in as much as i could possibly push it without breaking the front io. could it possibly be the jack issue?

Possibly. If pulling the channel balance over to one side or the other sounds normal but playing both only produces the "edges" (the difference between channels), that means the channels are referencing each other instead of ground.

 

This could be a bad jack, the front panel audio connector not being plugged in properly to the motherboard, a problem with the headphones, or a problem on the motherboard.

[an actual squirrel]

16 hours ago, rnhbs said:

my headphone is plugged in as much as i could possibly push it without breaking the front io. could it possibly be the jack issue?

 

Well, maybe something is physically preventing a good connection from happening. Also, maybe that internal cable to the front panel of the case has the wiring mixed up. You can rule out one of these by testing with another pair of headphones.  If the audio is normal with different headphones, then it was probably an issue with the jack not getting a good connection. If the audio is still messed up, I think the wiring is mixed up on the case cable.