Front headphone jack hissing/buzz... still

If nothing else, I'd like to know what Dell plans to do about this defect in future units. Are they going to continue to ship defective units with "no fix available"? Isn't this something that people should know about?

If I were a conspiracy nut, I'd say the moderator's actions of closing the original thread and replacing it with a locked one (that says mostly the same exact thing, just without those pesky complaints) was a clever way to make it less obvious that this has been an ongoing issue, because Dell wants to continue selling defective units. I would really like to know this is not the case, and that it will be rectified.

At the very least, they can stop treating us like they've done us a favor by even looking into it... this isn't a freeware application forum, this is a forum for people who have dropped upwards of $3,000 US on your equipment, only to have you dodge the issue of why it's defective and how it can be fixed for at least 4 months. I'd like to think an answer is forthcoming; if the answer is "no, we can't fix it, and we'd like to keep selling them this way" it would be nice to say so up front.

I want to know also.

My New XPS is 4 months old at this point and what will happen when the warranty runs out.

How many people here have a new Dell PC that has these problems are near the end of the 1 year warranty ??

I would like to here from Dell on how this will be handled as like the above poster stated,
The sticky post that states  No Hardware Fix at this time   is not good enough, it fails to say that this has been go on for at lease six months and i was not here before that so it may be longer. Or that Dell will repair or replace any PC even if the warrany is up as it looks like it might take that long.

Message Edited by mmainprize on 03-24-2004 03:05 PM

I've been waiting for nine months, and as I said many months ago on this forum I'm not holding my breath for a solution for this unit.

I'm sure though that Dell will eventually work out the problem and you can have a front headphone jack without hiss on your next Dell computer.

It's annoying, but this is really just a minor problem. And it's the only problem that I've had with my computer that couldn't be fixed with a quick call to Dell.

If they do come up with a solution, great. If they don't, I really can live with it.

There is no conspiracy afoot; I have simply not received a response to my inquiry as yet. I am continuing to request additional information from Dell Engineering, and will update my FAQ with any new information I receive.

Thank you for your patience. I understand your frustration, and I apologize on behalf of Dell.

Wow Cody, that was a pretty quick response and you even offered an apology on behalf of Dell.  That was a nice thing to do and it is the first one that I have read.  Maybe someone at Dell does care .  Have a great day!

Cody Wrote:
There is no conspiracy afoot; I have simply not received a response to my inquiry as yet. I am continuing to request additional information from Dell Engineering, and will update my FAQ with any new information I receive.

Thank you for your patience. I understand your frustration, and I apologize on behalf of Dell.

------------------------------------------------------------------

I would just like to make sure this don't get lost in the shuffle.
The Sticky post that was asking for information IS locked and no one can reply to it. Cody's statement noted above i guess he is talking about a response from Engineering as we can not reply to the original sticky post. They are no longer asking for PC service tag numbers so we will see what Dell position on this is soon i hope.

One thing for sure is that this problem being on the TOP of the line XPS Gamming system where people will want to use the front headphone and mic jacks will not take long to spread through the gamming forums and kill the sales from that market. So it is in Dell's best intrest to fix this. 

 

Finally, i found a solution. It's the dial-up modem. If you don't use it take it out, and you'll see the hissing/buzzing noise is gone.

Well, I'd try that, if I had a modem. Thanks though. :)

There is no shielding on the cables used to connect the front-panel connector to the audio board.  This is poor engineering practice and it looks like someone was either not paying attention to detail or was cutting corners on cost. Shielding may improve the noise issue but may not eliminate it completely.  There are more robust ways to to make this connection, however, these are more costly.  The best bet is to not use the front-panel connector.  Dell should not advertise the front panel feature until the put the proper engineering into its design to make it usable.

The post is gone, beeing looking for it today, I have not seen anypost stateing that it was fixed or that it can't be fixed. I guess DELL thinks if they just forget about it we will also.

Never did get the report from engineering.

Well i guess all us user that shelled out 2 to 4K for these XPS Gen2 PC should just live with the fact that the sound system has noise and you cant use it to do voice recognition with all the noise on the MIC input. 

If you use the microphone input on the audio board instead of the front panel, you should be OK.  You may want to buy an extension cable from Radio Shack if your microphone cord is too short.

wavlet, that is not the point and in my case that dose not solve the problem either.

1, they is so much noise on the front mic input that text is input with out talking when do voice reconition.
2, My PC is under a table with another PC on each side of it, i cant get to the back jacks that is what the front jacks are for.
3, If i could use the back jacks, my speakers are pluged in there also. My headset needs both a mic input and audio output. I could use a spliter but then the impeadance would be half of what it should be. Anyways it still has enough noise even on the back jacks to interfear with voice recintion not as bad as the front jacks though. This noise is at the BIOS/Dirver/motherboard  level.
4, It is not only the MIC or headphones front jacks that has problems, You can hear the noise in the main speakers if you adjust the level of the analog input being used above 75%. The work around is to lower the inputs levels and crank up the output levels. The side effect of that is you can not use the windows sounds, if you do they are so loud you jump out of your chair.

I could go on but it has all been said before. I should not have to live with this, DELL should either offer to replace my PC with one that dose not have the problem or locate the problem and fix it.

The whole point of my last post was to shead light on the fact that DELL is trying to sweep this under the rug as if it never happened. Well these types of action by DELL will catch up with them and people will find out the truth about these defective systems.

Message Edited by mmainprize on 06-05-2004 07:21 PM

Mmainprize,

I hear your frustration and I agree that Dell should really fix this problem - but I suspect that Dell is trying to avoid it because of the expense involved.  If you have decided not to return your computer, I was trying to identify some possible work-arounds for you.  One thing that struck me in your description was your MIC levels.  I did have a problem with microphone sensitivity which resulted in me cranking up both the MIC and audio outputs resulting in very poor signal to noise levels, and the resulting ear-shattering windows sounds.  This prevented me from using my telephonly modem as a speaker phone.  I eventually traced the problem to a faulty Audigy-2 card, which Dell replaced and this fixed the problem.

If you are using powered speakers, I would not worry about mismatched impedence. Secondly, on my system, the front-jack headphone noise, while not perfect, is significantly less of a problem than the the microphone jack.  You could still use the front-panel head-phone connector and the rear panel microphone jack if you want.  A more expensive fix, suggested by a someone else, was to buy the more expensive platinum Audigy sound board with front panel if you have a spare drive bay.  (This fix has not been verified, but it is a good bet that the Sound Blaster folks paid a little more attention to detail with regard to audio signal distribution.)

Again, I'm not trying to justify Dell's poor and very dissapointing response to this issue.  I'm sure Dell's engineering fully knows what the problem is - the issue is not if they can identify the root cause of the problem, but is if they can identify a cost-effective fix, which I suspect they cannot.  This is a classical cost/risk decision point for Dell.  It may be cheaper for Dell, in the long run, to just ignore these complaints and loose a few customers.  There is nothing we can do, short of a class-action law suite, to force Dell to address this.  I think if you press Dell, you should be able to return your computer for a full refund, however, I'm sure you know that buying and reconfiguring a new computer is a major pain and therefore a highly undesirable option. I'm sure Dell knows this too. 

Good luck!

 

Regards,

Wavlet