M14x Audio - hissing?

I was wondering if other members are experiencing a slight hiss/crackle occasionally when sound is absolutely quiet (nothing playing) via headphones?

I have some decent headphones which are nearly £120, or were when I bought them a few months ago, the type of headphones you'd expect a DJ or professional musician to wear (Sennheiser). I'm just wondering if it's the headphone's sensitivity to the sound, but saying that I don't get this issue on my Sony Vaio laptop or desktop PC. Ensure your sound isn't switching off when nothing is playing (via the Realtek manager, there's a power saving option there), this is how I notice it.

When sound is playing I can't hear the background noise, and sound quality is in my view equivalent to my desktop PC which has an X-Fi Fatality in it.

 

well, on my m11x, I have noticed a very, very, very slight amount of line noise that is not there with my uDAC2 (which the device itself has it's own set of issues). No popping. I know this is a different laptop, and not the same headphones (I have ATH-M50s variant), however, just to let you know you are not merely hearing things

 

I see, well I've done some browsing around and am going to try out the drivers at Realtek. 2011/6/3 sounds like they may be newer than the ones I have, if that's going by year, month and day date format, and assuming they work. They should though, ALC665 directs me to that driver page.

 

Well I've installed what possibly are newer drivers, but I don't think there's a difference, however I'm not certain but at least for me background noise seems non-existent at the moment, I disabled enhancements via the Playback Devices in Sound (Control Panel). In my view the sound quality is better with that off, which means essentially Realtek's enhancements (if any are enabled) are all ignored. But even with their enhancements off the sound still wasn't as good as it is now with disabling all enhancements via the Playback Devices/Sound in Control Panel. That's my opinion though, others I'm sure will question what I've said.

 

Just a follow up, if anyone reads this and they're getting hissing background noise (just faintly usually, and sometimes not all the time) I can say I've managed to fix mine, by either doing one of two things, probably both will help though.

I noticed a big difference when I went to the Playback Devices and disabled all enhancements there. Anyway...

1) Get the latest, and possibly newest Realtek audio driver if you're using ALC665, from Realtek.
2) Go to the Control Panel, Sounds, Playback Devices, Properties of your sound device listed there, Enhancements tab, and then check the 'Disable all enhancements' checkbox. Reboot if necessary and hopefully your hissing won't exist anymore, mine doesn't at least. Hope this helps.

Driver date for the Realtek driver link as of this post was 2011/6/3, which if it's year/month/day then it should be newer than the Dell drivers.

If you try this then please post feedback, if it has helped somewhat, completely, or not at all. I might have just been lucky.