sound problem with my S4

[AdamPollard55]

bought an S4 a few months ago. I'm slightly worried that I've already killed the sound card though :/

since its new and I want to get really comfortable with it first, I've only been rocking it in my room, so Ive been using the headphone jack to listen to everything. but Ive noticed the sound is actually horrible now. you can notice it mostly when its just a bassline and kick (like when an electro track drops), and you get all this not nice sounding stuff happening in the top end that really isn't there when I AB with my onboard sound card. its like distortion crunch, but worse, really unmusical.

I also quite like blasting it at full gain regularly (cause louder=better obviously), and after speaking to a load of people, they said you can kill a sound card by running it at full gain. so now I think this is what has happened.

what do you think?

if this has killed it, will it affect the main outputs or is the monitor bit separate to the main outs?
andddddd, if so, why do they allow sound cards to be turned up to a destructive level?!?! :S:S


hope you can help. as you might imagine, I'm quite annoyed having dropped like 750 on this..

[mwn11]

I think it would more likely be the headphones youve f**cked than the s4. Its hard to even make them clip let alone blowing the card.

[kooper1980]

Yeah agree with the above. Are you sure its not just clipping? what are your gains set at? master gain? Is the output indicator red lining when you are playing? maybe post a screen shot of traktor when this happens.

[vzk]

On my macbook / os x version, I sometimes experienced that after a long run of Traktor Pro 2 the headphone out sounds like less quality mp3 (compare a 320 kBit to a 64 kBit Version then you get the idea). It never affected the main output and after a restart (after the gog ended), the headphones sounded ok again.

Idea:If you use sleep mode, restart the computer before your gig.

One possible reason that I never checked could be some internal memory ressource getting lower and it saves memory where it can without affecting main output... But as I said, that's an assumption that I never verified.