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Horrible hissing on sound - help!

 
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A few weeks ago I installed a "D-Link USB Radio" on my main Windows 2000 PC. Despite having a USB connection that was used only for control, it plugged in to a sound card input socket ffor the actual signal.
I was disappointed with the performance of it (it only pulled in the very strongest local radio station, and that sounded horrible), so I attempted to uninstall it. Unfortunately, now all sound from my PC sounds equally horrible. It sounds like an input to the sound card has somehow been left open and turned up to maximum gain, and is picking up lots of mushy, hissy interference.
I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware fault, because if I leave the speakers turned on when I reboot, the horrible noise only appears part way through the Windows start-up procedure.
Has anyone got any suggestions as to what I can do about this? It's driving me crazy.
Many thanks in advance.
 
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If you have digital output, did the USB install flip it back to analog by accident/design? Or vica-versa?
 
Frank Carver
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Thanks Mike. I don't think it's that, though. I can hear some of the actual sound content, but if I play an MP3, for example, it's only slightly louder than the "noise".
I think what I'll do is try and trawl around for upgraded or more appropriate drivers and re-install the device. Maybe that'll clear up whatever it has done.
 
Frank Carver
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I've had more of a play with this now, and it seems that the problem is/was that the "radio" installation set the default settings for my sound card to enable the microphone input and set a 20dB input boost.
When I finally found the settings for the sound card, I was able to manually check-then-uncheck the 20dB boost box, at which point sound became fine again. This was great, until I rebooted, at which point it got set to the stupid settings again.
So the problem has mutated into:
Does anyone know how to configure the default sound card settings (for my "SoundBlaster Live!") at boot? I guess it's in the registry somewhere ...
 
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