All headphones making loud clicking noise

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Level 1

4 points

All headphones making loud clicking noise

I rarely use the headphones on my 8G ipod touch - only when cutting the grass. I use the ipod in the car all the time - I have a wire that connects the speaker jack to the AUX in the car. The ipod works fine in the car.

Just today, when I use the headphones - there is a loud clicking or popping noise - unaffected by the volume control. If I turn the volume all the way down and unplug & replug the headphones, they will work with a low volume. As soon the the volume approaches 1/3 the way up, the popping begins.

It does this with all headphone sets I've tried. It does NOT do it with the direct connection to the car, the cradle on the clock radio, or if I connect the speakers from the computer.

I've tried resetting the unit and I wiped it clean and reloaded everything with no change. It is also fully charged.

Any thoughts???

Message was edited by: Elmo T

8G iPod Touch, Windows XP

Posted on Sep 29, 2008 6:23 PM

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Answer 1

KTrinh93

Level 1

20 points

Oct 3, 2008 2:53 PM in response to Elmo T

That clicking noise is what I believe is called "clipping". This is when the sound wave produced by your music exceeds what the device is supposed to. It's like trying to sing a note out of your voice range. If you have to do it, it sounds bad. In this case, the loud clicking noise you explained. The speakers in your car probably have a larger range of sound production, and therefore can play your music without the clipping. The iPod headphones can't produce such sounds because they are so small. To fix this, setting a general equalizer setting. Most likely the clipping is happening in the treble line, so you would want to set your equalizer to Treble reducer. To do this on your iPod, go to Settings > Music > EQ > Treble Booster (3rd one from the bottom).

Hope this works! I know that this is annoying too but I managed to fix it a more complicated ways such as importing to Audacity, which is an audio editing software, and then compressing it so that none of the channels clipped.

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