Recently I returned to my office after prolonged absence on sick leave.  My USB pod had never malfunctioned there before.  But now, although it continues to work fine at home, in the office I cannot get past the Check Your Audio Settings without a warning that the sound quality is poor.  It's true.  When I click Play Back I hear a loud buzzing over my voice. 

I thought it might be a fluorescent ceiling lamp about to go but it doesn't seem to be the lights or airconditioning.  Initially I thought they were the culprits because one day after every one else had gone I tried working with air conditioner and lights off and it was fine.  But today I tried that again and the buzzing was still there.

Voice recognition at the office is now terrible.  In my years with a poor quality analogue headset and poor quality built in SoundMax soundcard I had plenty of poor recognition problems but never due to buzzing.  We have for at least 3 years been subject to power problems in my office block. (Frequent outages - the area is a former rural suburb rapidly developing into a business node with plenty of new buildings going up and inadequate infrastructure.)

I'd really like to know if USB pods are subject to electronic interference - and if so how to solve it. 

DNS 10 SP1 Preferred, Plantronics USB pod, HP 8540 notebook PC with Win XP SP3, 3 GB RAM, 2.53 GHz CPU set to run at 2.53 GHz i.e.  power scheme = Always On, 212 GB free on hard drive.

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Did you move offices upon your return to work? If so, maybe the new outlet where your computer is plugged in isn't grounded. That could cause some interference. You can check it with a voltage tester.

My older home has a mixture of grounded and ungrounded plugs, and as I "travel" from room to room, I definitely avoid the ungrounded outlets.

-Russ