SOLVED Audio Crackling

[Twisted4000]

Hello, just today I noticed my computer's audio occasionally makes pops or crackles on either one of the speakers while I'm listening to any sound. I know it's not just the speakers, because I also have headphones that are plugged into my keyboard's audio jacks, and they also get the same popping and crackling problems when I listen through them. It leads me to believe that it is a software/sound card issue.

This started happening since I flashed my motherboard, which was an attempt to fix some GPU issue I was having (which didn't end up fixing it, I fixed that with a simple tweak in the NVIDIA control panel...).

I have installed the latest Realtek audio drivers, and even tried installing my motherboard's audio drivers again from the website, tried adjusting settings, but still no luck. Every minute or so, and in some cases every couple of minutes, I get a crackle or pop-like noise in my audio. Not intensely annoying, but annoying enough, and I don't want any little issues like this in my computer.

Any ideas?

 

[ozan]

Hello, just today I noticed my computer's audio occasionally makes pops or crackles on either one of the speakers while I'm listening to any sound. I know it's not just the speakers, because I also have headphones that are plugged into my keyboard's audio jacks, and they also get the same popping and crackling problems when I listen through them. It leads me to believe that it is a software/sound card issue.

This started happening since I flashed my motherboard, which was an attempt to fix some GPU issue was having (which didn't end up fixing it, I fixed that with a simple tweak in the NVIDIA control panel...).

I have installed the latest Realtek audio drivers, and even tried installing my motherboards audio drivers again from the website, tried adjusting settings, but still no luck. Every minute or so, and in some cases every couple of minutes, I get a crackle or pop-like noise in my audio. Not intensely annoying, but annoying enough, and I don't want any little issues like this in my computer.

Any ideas?

We will check for hardware latencies with this tool.
Please check with it and post a screenshot. Can help more once you do that

 

[Twisted4000]

Alright I ran the program, and this is a screenshot I took. what exactly is a "dropout"?

 

[ozan]

Oh that verifies it. You have a misbehaving hardware/driver. My money is on driver/firmware. Post you pc specs

 

[Twisted4000]

Oh that verifies it. You have a misbehaving hardware/driver. My money is on driver/firmware. Post you pc specs

OS - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Motherboard - Gigabyte P45T-ES3G
CPU - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.66GHz
RAM - 12GB DDR3 @ 1333Mhz
GPU - NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1GB

It seems to have happened ever since I flashed the motherboard for something else. I tried taking the coin battery out and putting it back in after 15 seconds but no luck there either. I even updated to the latest Realtek and NVIDIA audio drivers but nothing.

 

[ozan]

Try disabling onboard audio from the bios and uninstalling nvidia drivers seperately. They may be the issue.

Otherwise I consider storage devices to be the biggest suspect in this situation. Try flashing your hdd new firmware if avaliable?. Maybe a new ssd will do you good

 

[Twisted4000]

Try disabling onboard audio from the bios and uninstalling nvidia drivers seperately. They may be the issue.

Otherwise I consider storage devices to be the biggest suspect in this situation. Try flashing your hdd new firmware if avaliable?. Maybe a new ssd will do you good

I'm a bit confused, so I should try disabling the audio from the BIOS, and then uninstall the NVIDIA drivers? Do the NVIDIA audio drivers even affect the Realtek audio driver at all? And I just got this SSD like 8 months ago.

 

[ozan]

I'm a bit confused, so I should try disabling the audio from the BIOS, and then uninstall the NVIDIA drivers? Do the NVIDIA audio drivers even affect the Realtek audio driver at all? And I just got this SSD like 8 months ago.

No, check dpclat with audio disabled from bios, if problem persists enable them back, then try removing your graphics card from your pc and using onboard graphics if that will help.

 

[Twisted4000]

Well, I disabled every single audio-associated thing in my device manager, restarted the computer, and though I couldn't hear anything (obviously), dpclat was still picking up on dropouts. So I would have to believe that it's actually not a sound card issue then, right?

I've tried disabling USB hub controllers, the graphics card, the ethernet and wi-fi cards, a whole bunch of different processes such as my anti-virus, but nothing seems to be changing anything. I really have no clue what could be causing these dropouts.

 

[Twisted4000]

Another update, I started using LatencyMon, and it's saying that these are the drivers causing the most problems:

ntoskrnl.exe
hal.dll
USBPORT.SYS
ataport.SYS
ndis.sys
tcpip.sys
dxgkrnl.sys
nvlddmkm.sys
rspLLL64.sys
Wdf01000.sys

I looked up every one of these in a database of drivers and SYS files online, and they all say you can get them with Windows Update. Though I have everything completely up-to-date, Windows cannot find any new updates, I've updated every single driver I have. What do I do?

 

[Twisted4000]

I just fixed it, I think.

I did a couple of things, not sure which one specifically did the trick, but here's everything I did. I disabled all of the power-saving features in the motherboard, anything that would take over the CPU in order to cool it down or "optimize its performance". And in the control panel Advanced System Settings I set it to "Background Services" instead of "Programs".

Haven't gotten any random spikes in either LatencyMon or dpclat. All of the SYS and DLL files showing huge numbers in LatencyMon are all now under 1ms. Not noticing the audio crackling or anything like that.

With this I conclude that it wasn't a driver issue, but rather just CPU throttling takeover features in the BIOS. They must have enabled themselves when I flashed the motherboard.