Static from my speakers
 

A worrying new development: while doing nothing in particular, I'm hearing intermittent bursts of electric static through my PC's speakers. I have a pair of MidiLand speakers running through a subwoofer into my sound card's input jack, and that configuration hasn't changed in years.

It doesn't seem like it's a reproducible thing -- i.e. it's not as if running any particularly system-stressing program is causing it, as it's happening during idle times.

Other than the static, the sound I'm hearing from the sound card is normal.

Without a second pair of speakers to check with, where should I begin troubleshooting this? Power strip, speakers, sound card...?

Two things:

1) You have speakers connected to your input jack? :p

2) How long have you had the speakers? Age will produce static/noise due to dirty volume controls and/or worn jacks/plugs. Try wiggling your cabling and tweaking the volume control and see if the problem rears up.

Hope this helps.

Sometimes I hear truckers talking on mine if I'm not playing music or anything. Think maybe it's something like that?

Input jack, output jack, whatever. It's plugged in the right place.

What I'm leery of is that it's a sign of something more seriously electrically wrong. I'm in the habit of leaving it running overnight and such, and don't want to wake up to find something major fried.

It's probbaly just electromagnetic interference (EMI) being picked up by the sound card or the speakers. The source could be something nearby (another card in the system, printer, cordless phone, etc). Cell phones are a frequent cause of this, if you keep your cell phone on or near your desk, it's probbaly the culprit. It could also be something farther away, like high-voltage lines near your house, or a broadcast tower.

If it is EMI, is sometimes helps to reroute the power and audio cables, so they aren't running alongside other cables. Do you have headphones you can plug in? If so, do they have the same behavior?

Also, you are sure it's the speakers, right? Not one of the fans inside the case?

I had a pair of Labtec speakers which I'd been using for, like, six years, which started doing this exact thing.

They stopped when I hooked them up to something else...but when I put a new set of speakers on my computer, the symptoms also stopped.

Summary? I have no damn idea...

Absolutely sure. The crackle-crackle is coming directly from the speakers when it happens.

I'll see about picking up a new pair of speakers and see if they help.

(I'm a nasty, paranoid soul when it comes to electricity and things suddenly changing. If I'd just changed things, moved things around, rewired things, added components, installed new sound drivers, etc. and suddenly I heard this, I'd have a reason to expect it. But when the computer and relevant wiring haven't been moved in months, the environment around them is the same as it has been for years and suddenly this is starting up, that says "something in hardware is failing" to me.)

Try taking the sub-woofer out of the loop. Sub-woofers usually have an amp and circuits that could be leaking over to them.
Or record the static while reading a bad poem and become a rap star.:)