T400 sound has a lot of crackling in headphones

Hi Everyone,

I just got my T400 today and it's GREAT, except for the fact that music through headphones is accompanied by a constant static and crackling sound. It's got the Conexant SmartAudio 221 audio chip and I'm running Vista 64 on it. Anyone encounter this or have a workaround?

 

did you try contacting lenovo? does it do this both running on battery and pluged in?

 

Different headphones and computers do this differently. I use etymotic er-6i and they work just fine with my x200. However, when I plug them into my desktop, a Macbook Pro, or even my iPod I can pick up some static, crackling, and/or hard drive access. It could be an internal electrical issue (if it happens on battery), or a bad AC adapter/low quality electric (if it only happens when plugged in), or the headphone jack could be trying to overdrive them. Please post the exact make/model of the headphones you are using.

Three possible workarounds: Use cheaper headphones (Only good headphones show defects in the source). Use a secondary sound card and/or inline volume control (this should alleviate the problem, but it is not very convenient). Contact Lenovo, complain, ask for a replacement motherboard, and hope that the new one is better.

 

I had a problem with my sound earlier yesterday, it turned out i had to update the driver.

 

yeh you should try updating drivers. on my old dell, i didnt update sound drivers or i simply just messed up the driver install, and the sound behaved like you described.

 

The distortion shows up when on battery and on AC, though it seems to happen only when there's long sustained bass in the audio. I did update drivers and I even did a full system recovery.

I called Lenovo and they told me that there probably isn't much they could do but they would take a look at it. I asked the guy if he'd ever heard of this happening and he said no, so I'm guessing either people don't do any high quality listening on the T400 or this problem is not that common. I'm still on the fence about sending it in...

I'm using some Etymotic ER-4Ps so I hear just about everything. I tried out the crappy headphones that came with my HP DV5 and I can still hear the distortion. I'm leaning towards that the T400 has a crappy sound card since it isn't exactly designed to be a media powerhouse. I may just get a USB sound card (Creative X-fi xmod looks good).

On the other hand the HP DV5 has amazing sound quality, but that laptop is being donated to someone else, hah.

 

Yes HP dv4t has great audio quality and is much louder than T400

 

Your problem actually doesn't sound near as severe as you laid it out initially. I thought you meant that just by plugging your headphones in you heard distortion (this is my case with the Macbook Pro and my Desktop computer when using my ER-6i). If it only occurs when you play bass heavy music, then you are just trying to ask for too much out of the integrated card. A replacement from Lenovo probably will not fix the issue.

I would recommend a USB/expresscard soundcard, or USB headphones (although seeing as the ER-4P retail for $300, I doubt you want to do the latter) because they will bypass the internal sound processor.

 

I have an M-Audio USB soundcard that I use for recording. I also plug my speakers into it for crystal clear audio when I'm docked.

 

Your problem actually doesn't sound near as severe as you laid it out initially. I thought you meant that just by plugging your headphones in you heard distortion (this is my case with the Macbook Pro and my Desktop computer when using my ER-6i). If it only occurs when you play bass heavy music, then you are just trying to ask for too much out of the integrated card. A replacement from Lenovo probably will not fix the issue.

I would recommend a USB/expresscard soundcard, or USB headphones (although seeing as the ER-4P retail for $300, I doubt you want to do the latter) because they will bypass the internal sound processor.