Weird random/intermittent audio issue.

[William Payne]

I am having a weird audio issue that only happens randomly with my computer. No set time or thing causes it to happen it is completely random. It seemed to only start once I went to a Panasonic SC-HTB200 soundbar. 

 

The issue is a random audio slow down. When this happens it will sound like someone suddenly set audio to half speed or something. When this happens it will also slow down any video or game that is playing and will show stuttering lag in the mouse curser and the system fans will increase slightly in rpm. This phenomenon only lasts a couple of seconds. 

 

System temperature is fine, my system never gets hot even under load. My fans never really ramp up much as everything is very quiet. 

 

The sound bar is connected via optical cable into the motherboard and changing to a slightly higher quality cable did improve things but the phenomenon remains. 

 

All drivers are up to date. 

 

I have had it happen a couple of times where it froze the whole system and restarted itself. 

 

I am just wanting to rule out possible causes before I go buying speakers that were made for PC use rather than a tv soundbar. 

 

I don't want to buy a higher quality cable or maybe a sound card or other things if they are not going to solve the problem. 

[Psittac]

I have always been under the impression that toslink or spdif is a one way protocol, but I could be wrong.  Information with a quick google search doesn't tell me much.  If this is the case then it likely isn't your soundbar, at most it could be the computer trying to output through the toslink for some unknown reason causes this problem.  My guess would be that it's not downstream from your computer.

 

One way to check my idea is to verify whether or not the spdif connection knows if anything is connected or not.

 

Have you tried disconnecting the soundbar and deselecting the spdif connection as the audio output?  This will tell you whether or not it has anything to do with the soundbar.

[William Payne]

1 hour ago, Psittac said:

I have always been under the impression that toslink or spdif is a one way protocol, but I could be wrong.  Information with a quick google search doesn't tell me much.  If this is the case then it likely isn't your soundbar, at most it could be the computer trying to output through the toslink for some unknown reason causes this problem.  My guess would be that it's not downstream from your computer.

 

One way to check my idea is to verify whether or not the spdif connection knows if anything is connected or not.

 

Have you tried disconnecting the soundbar and deselecting the spdif connection as the audio output?  This will tell you whether or not it has anything to do with the soundbar.

The toslink port on the motherboard is audio out only. The soundbar works fine all the time except for when this phenomenon happens. When I was using my monitors speaker through display port on my gpu I never had this problem. It really is a weird one. 

 

[William Payne]

What made me swap the cable was I want to know whether there was a bottleneck in there causing a slowdown because I purchased some crappy cable. So I swapped it for a more expensive but not the most expensive monster toslink cable and it did improve things by improve things I mean that it didn't seem to slow things down as much and wasn't as harsh. 

 

So that still makes me think that maybe there is some limitation with the toslink somewhere.