I ain't got a gat, but I got a soldering gun...

If you're reading this, it's because you have an NZXT Vulcan case that is giving you horrid audio artifacts through the front audio port because of the ground loop they designed into their printed circuit board.  Here's what you need to do to fix it.

Here you can see that the path from audio jacks to the audio ground wire is shared with the same path that's used for the USB.  In order to eliminate the ground loop (and the annoying sounds that come with it) you have to separate the grounds. 

Using a dremel with an engraving tool, I separated the front audio cable header ground wire from the rest of the circuits. 

Then I separated the audio grounds near the jacks from the everything as well.  

Then I soldered a wire connecting the grounds of the jacks (you only need to do one since they're both connected) and then solder it to the ground wire on the header.

That's all you have to do. I had originally just jumped a wire from the headphone over the header ground, but it stuck up too high and broke off when I installed it in the case. So I ended up laying a wire flat and running it like a trace on the pcb.

This eliminated all the noise I was picking up through my front audio headphone jack, and the speakers too.

NZXT - if you read this, you owe me money for the engineering re-work on your case design. Thank you.

I do have to hand it to NZXT though. I sent them an email describing my problem with my case, and they responded by sending me a new front audio/USB cabling and hardware. Which, kudos to them for sending me something, rather than just blowing me off. Yet they sent me the exact same pcb and it didn't fix the problem. It did give me enough confidence though to modify one of them to see if I could do it, with a backup in case things went wrong.

Fortunately, this worked out great, and now I've got a replacement part if I ever need it.

I also have to hand it to Creative, as after this, the X-Fi Titanium really shined. The audio quality is fantastic. I also like how the 'modes' keep track of settings for headphones and speakers separately, and automatically switches when I plug my headphones, or unplug them. That way the CMS3D is on when the headphones are in and on game mode, but off when using my 5.1 speakers or listening to music with headphones. Nice. I had to do it manually with my old card. It's really a nice piece of hardware and sounds great. And for 36 bucks, it was a steal! In a way I almost felt sorry for Creative: I wondered how many people returned these cards under the presumption they were defective, when all along they were really fine and their case was a bad design like mine. At any rate, it ended up benefiting me because I got one on the cheap because of it.

But then I'm reminded of the headache of their software and the planned obsolescence Creative has embraced to maintain their cash flow, and think: I'm glad I didn't have to give them more money than I had to because I know my card will be obsolete before it really should be.