Sound issues on an HP laptop

I was not sure where else to put this, so I put it in the general forum.

Anyway, just recently the sound on my HP Pavilion XF328 laptop began doing some rather strange things.

The machine is 1.4g athlon xp 1500 (i believe) 256m, integrated sound, 16m video, 10/100 ethernet, wireless network connection through pcm card, usb mouse. WinXP Home is installed, with all recent updates. Zone Alarm Firewall, AVG Antivirus, and Spybot are all running, w/no detected viruses/spyware/trojans.

It generally only happens during music playback, and it happens no matter which media player I use. I have tried Winamp and Windows Media Player, but no others.

The problem is that whatever sound is playing distorts every few seconds for maybe a second at a time. The distortion is a crackling/buzzing/hissing.

I have reinstalled the sound drivers twice, uninstalled and reinstalled the audio codecs, and the problem persists. Google was not much help.

The problem persists whether playing through the laptop's own speakers, or piped to my computer speaker set through the headphone jack.

Another strange thing is that during movie playback, if the sound is distorting, playback can be paused and restarted, and the distortion goes away. However, this does not work for music playback.

It also seems to affect it, especially during movie playback, if a sound occurs which is a little different than the other sounds currently playing. This will cause it to begin distorting.

Any help will be appreciated, if anything, a point in the right direction would be a blessing indeed.

Crackling and hissing are usually a sign of either the speakers going or the sound card itself.

I had a similar issue and t/s it down to the sound card -- granted, that was in a desktop, but similar issue.

In a laptop, often a sound card will be used for internal modem (sound waves are expressed via special software loaded by the manufacturer. (I have seen this in some old desktops as well; like conexant cards. )

Are you having modem difficulty or do you use broadband? (ethernet or wireless)?

If I had to place a guess, I would say it's the sound card.

I would go to HP's web site, find out what sort of card system it is. If it's still under warranty I would contact HP. If not, you may need to contact them anyway or try to find a outside market supplier -- provided you concur with my assessment.

Cheers.

I use broadband over WiFi, so I would not know about modem issues.

I am beginning to wonder if it is the card itself, but its really strange that it only does it during music and some movie playback.

And about stopping when the video is paused and then started again...?

Anyway, thanks for the help, I'm going to keep working on it.

Btw mods, sorry for posting in wrong forum.