Sound issues.

[MrMutt]

So I've been running Leopard on this computer for the past few months and haven't had many problems come up that were not fixed easily but the other night something went mysteriously wrong.

I left my computer on all night, as I usually do, and when I woke up the sound was just weird. It's almost as though my speakers are playing in another room and they sound like overdriven headphones with no dynamic range. There is no "presence" in any sound played off of my computer now as well as a great deal of clipping.

The speakers work fine when plugged into my iPod, and my mid-tier headphones give the same horrible distorted sound from the PC. Even movies played through VLC are wrong.

I've previously had issues with sound skipping when scrolling through webpages but that was fixed by getting my system to recognize that I have a dual core processor. I only experience this slightly when looking at a high res image at full crop at this point.

 

I run:

iPC 10.5.6

Core2Duo E4300 @1.8GHz

Asus P5B Standard

1x 160GB SATA

1x 80GB SATA

1x LG SATA DVD Burner

2x 1GB DDR2@667mHz

Asus 7300GS w/ 256MB DDR

Onboard Sound

Cheapo 450W PSU

Oh and more than a week ago I updated iTunes to version 8.1.

 

Is there any way I can access advanced audio controls to try to fix this?