Background Sound Distortion

**EBoundEE** · 04-03-2004, 07:45 PM

I got my carputer up and running and am having a small problem. I run my sound in this setup:

PCI Soundcard -> analog to RCA converter -> RCA couplers -> monster cable -> auxiallary input on my panasonic head unit.

Now, I have sound and everything, it's just in the background I can hear this whiny high pitch frequency that sounds like my car. It even goes up in frequency when I accelerate, etc.

Anyways I'm wondering if this is normal or if something is up and if I can fix it.

**DustinR** · 04-03-2004, 09:08 PM

I had the same problem in my setup for a while. Its still there if you listen really hard but the problem lay mostly in grounding and power. Ground everything. Even things your not used to grounding. And do so all at a central point. Also at the same time i was grounding everything nicely i put in my DC-DC PSU. Thats just from my experience though. Im sure in short time there wil be someone in here spouting about ground loop isolators or similar things. Ive never seen that stuff work though. So basically ground it all and ground it well.

-Dustin

**EBoundEE** · 04-04-2004, 04:11 PM

My setup includes this:

Opus 90 watt DC-DC: grounded pretty well I think
Asus CULS-2 or somethin with a 766 mhz celeron
ATI Radeon 9200SE 64 mb AGP
Cheap Trident 4DWave DX PCI sound card
NIC and 256 mb of SDRAM

I also have a roll-up keyboard and a wireless trackball mouse. Now another thing I just noticed is whenever I move the mouse a little and I have hte volume up pretty high I can hear the mouse moving or something. It makes a little noise when I move the trackball around.

For display a Pyramid 7in TFT LCD hooked up by an RCA cable from the LCD to the video card. Also it is powered by the Opus PSU also using the little connector deal you can buy extra.

So what exactly do I have to all ground besides the power supply?