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Severe audio distortion using USB sound card
aklossner
Soul Shriven
TL;DR: Using an external USB sound “card” causes bad audio distortion and messes with other USB devices. No other game or software has this problem.
I’ve been fighting this for a year and a half: a laptop computer by itself plays ESO just fine. However, when connected to a large HDMI display, USB sound card and 5.1 speakers, and USB mouse and keyboard, it does not. When the game starts up the sound is good, but eventually it crackles so badly that speech can barely be understood. This is worse when there are a lot of other players about, as during festivals.
When it’s really bad, the keyboard and mouse misbehave with substantial lag. This is true even when I open a terminal window on another display and type to it. It appears that the entire USB stack is compromised. When I quit the game, the lag is still there and recedes slowly, taking many seconds to return to normal.
This problem occurs on laptops from two generations (Windows 10 and Windows 11). I tested two different USB sound cards with different drivers. I tried both a modern wireless mouse and an ancient wired one. No other game or audio source has ever caused this problem. (I’ve played through a lot of audio-intensive games including Oblivion, Skyrim, and Witcher 3.)
I have finally found a workaround: I remove the USB sound card and use an HDMI audio extractor on the cable to the external monitor, feeding the same 5.1 speakers. (The device is available from Amazon as dp/B071KXR3G2). All problems gone, and I can finally understand Isobel Veloise when she talks about how much she loves delves.
I’ve never seen this problem discussed here or elsewhere, so I post this for others who might encounter it.
I’ve been fighting this for a year and a half: a laptop computer by itself plays ESO just fine. However, when connected to a large HDMI display, USB sound card and 5.1 speakers, and USB mouse and keyboard, it does not. When the game starts up the sound is good, but eventually it crackles so badly that speech can barely be understood. This is worse when there are a lot of other players about, as during festivals.
When it’s really bad, the keyboard and mouse misbehave with substantial lag. This is true even when I open a terminal window on another display and type to it. It appears that the entire USB stack is compromised. When I quit the game, the lag is still there and recedes slowly, taking many seconds to return to normal.
This problem occurs on laptops from two generations (Windows 10 and Windows 11). I tested two different USB sound cards with different drivers. I tried both a modern wireless mouse and an ancient wired one. No other game or audio source has ever caused this problem. (I’ve played through a lot of audio-intensive games including Oblivion, Skyrim, and Witcher 3.)
I have finally found a workaround: I remove the USB sound card and use an HDMI audio extractor on the cable to the external monitor, feeding the same 5.1 speakers. (The device is available from Amazon as dp/B071KXR3G2). All problems gone, and I can finally understand Isobel Veloise when she talks about how much she loves delves.
I’ve never seen this problem discussed here or elsewhere, so I post this for others who might encounter it.
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Sarannah✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭✭Not familiar with usb soundcards myself, but I have dealt with conflicting usb devices before.
To me this seems like you may have conflicting IRQ numbers for your usb devices. Check device manager(windows 10/11) to make sure the usb soundcard does not have the same IRQ number assigned as any other usb devices in use, and change the IRQ number manually if you have to.
Hope this helps!
PS: After checking this, it seems usb soundcards do not have a pre-determined irq number or number range assigned to them. So yours may be 'stealing' the irq from another usb device. Causing conflicts.0 -
mook-eb16_ESO✭✭✭✭As you are using a laptop change your laptop's power profile to high performance mode see this page https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000211304-Using-the-High-performance-power-plan-Windows on Ableton's website. These kind of tweaks are common for people who need to prioritise audio reliability and prevent buffer underruns. This is especially true if your laptop is not plugged into a power source whilst playing the game. Eso is a more cpu intensive than gpu intensive. You can see your cpu utilisation is running in game by using the command perfmon /res in run (winkey+r). You can look at which applications are using more processor power disable / shutdown any non essential apps that are using cpu power in the background. See apps>start up, as laptops are often loaded with bloatware. You should have at least 16gb of ram on your laptop, Other lines of fault finding are update drivers from your laptop manufacturers (chipset) often you will find an updater app preinstalled this may also update your uefi. Additionally if everything else looks ok you may want to change some of the eso settings if your cpu still has high utilisation like, disabling addons, adjusting the number of particles and or the view distance.... see many online articles for optimising eso settings.0