Weird buzz with laptop connected

I've got a Pioneer Premier deck, with the RCA bus adapter. I'm running shielded RCA's to my laptop, and when I have the deck running on the Aux channel the sound is great. But when I run my laptop off an inverter I get really bad buzzing. Great, I'd expect a bad ground. Not the case. I hooked up the inverter directly to the batter and have the same issue. It's not alternator whine since I get the buzzing with the car off. The weird thing, I get the same buzz when the alternator is hooked up to a battery that is outside the car. To top it off, if i unplug the RCA's and listen to the music off the laptop's speakers(still running off the inverter) I don't hear any buzz. What the heck is going on??? I can't seem to isolate and fix the problem.

Whoops, forgot to re-read and correct spelling errors. The weird thing, I get the same buzz when the **inverter** is hooked up to a different battery that is outside the car.

Actually its most likley the laptop, open up your volume control on your laptop and adjust you wave volume and master volume until the noise goes awayIts the same thing that my laptop did, the gain "per-se" is to high on the laptop thus you must lower it to match the input of the AUX channel, once you nolonger hear any noise than leave it alone and enjoy the tunes--Skold2004 Honda Civic Ex 4Dr

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Your buzz is called a ground loop.  The problem is your laptop and the inverter need to be at the same ground potential as the head unit.  This is nearly impossible with a laptop as you have no access to the actual sound card ground plane.  The best you can do is try to properly ground the inverter - including it's case if it's metal -  to the car's chassis and hope for the best. Support the12volt.com

DYohn wrote: Your buzz is called a ground loop. The problem is your laptop and the inverter need to be at the same ground potential as the head unit. This is nearly impossible with a laptop as you have no access to the actual sound card ground plane. The best you can do is try to properly ground the inverter - including it's case if it's metal - to the car's chassis and hope for the best.

But why would the buzz go away when I run the laptop off it's own battery(no inverter)?

M4LFUNCT10N wrote: But why would the buzz go away when I run the laptop off it's own battery(no inverter)?

Because then it's not using the vehicle's power.  The ground loop is due to the difference between the ground in the inverter and the car.  Try properly grounding the converter, like I suggested, and see if it helps.  It might or it might not, but it is the first thing to try.

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