# Sound Card Causing Snap Crackle Pop



## sorcos (Jan 24, 2007)

I have a rather old system. Specs are on the left, but here they are again:

Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Ati Radeon x850 XT PE AGP
AMD Athlon XP Barton 2800+
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe (nforce2 chipset)
Antec Trio 650watt
 Windows XP

As of right now, I am getting a constant snapping, crackling, and popping all of the time. It doesn't matter what I am doing. The problem did not happen when I first got the computer 5 or 6 years ago. However, I do not know when the problem started happening. I had assumed it was the speakers, so I decided to live with it until I got a new set of speakers. 

Well I have just now got a new set of speakers and nothing has changed. I plugged in some headphones directly into the sound card just to make sure and I can still hear the noise. Maybe it was just my imagination, but when it started to happen, it seemed like the noise would get worse and worse over time, but like I said, now it is just a constant problem - as soon as windows loads. I have looked in dozens of places for an answer, but everything I try does not help at all. I have read that many people get this problem with using a Creative sound card with nvidia chipsets. Although, if I remember correctly, it was mostly a Creative X-fi card causing the problems. I am also a bit reluctant to settle for this answer because I had believed, without a doubt, that I had fixed the problem, twice! Here are some of the things I have done to try and fix it, but first I just want to let you know that the onboard sound has never been installed. When I set up the computer, I disabled the onboard sound in the BIOS and made sure the drivers for it were never installed.


I first decided to try kX Audio Drivers for the sound card. This did not help, but I am still using it because the mixer gives me a peak meter to measure the sound from the sound card.
I then read about changing the pci latency of the video card. I don't believe there are any options in my BIOS for this, so I used ATI Tool (and later PCI Latency Tool) to change the latency. I first set it to 64 and restarted the computer. This appeared to fix the problem. There was no crackling, and the peak meter showed no sound from the sound card (except for when there was supposed to be sound).
I wanted to see if the Creative drivers would still work, so I removed the kX driver via the uninstall program, followed by Driver Cleaner Pro. Then I installed the Creative drivers. This is when the crackling came back. So I went back to the kX drivers and have not been able to remove the crackling again. Even trying many different pci latencies for both the video card and sound card.
I made sure there were no IRQ conflicts.
Convinced it had something to do with the pci bus, I removed/disabled everything from the computer, leaving just the essentials (I had this fax modem thing and an IEEE 1394 connection card). As I do not know much about the pci bus, I never uninstalled anything related to these, I thought removing them, and disabling things in the device manager would be enough. This did not change anything with the crackling.
I moved the sound card to different pci slots, uninstalling and removing drivers before each move.
Since Ati cards install both a primary and secondary item in the device manager (for dual monitors), I decided to disable the secondary one. When restarting, it seemed to be working perfectly. Again, no crackle and no output on the peak meter. I restarted a couple more times and used the computer some. All seemed to be fine. I then put everything back the way it was, including the pci cards I took out, restarted the computer the next morning (as it was 2:30am) and the crackle was back.

I have been removing and reinstalling drivers since then with no luck. I currently have restored my computer from an image I created after installing windows, video card drivers, and sound card drivers, nothing else. The crackle is still there. I also removed the sound card, installed the onboard sound and it works good.

Is there any insight to any of this that anyone could give? Is it indeed a problem between my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 and the nvidia chipsets? Is my sound card bad? Why would it work perfectly when I changed the pci latency on the video card one time, and when I disabled the secondary video card in the device manager? I also made sure that DisableProgPCILatency in the registry is set to 1. This makes sure that the latency does not get reset to a high level I believe.

I hope this long post doesn't deter anyone, and I hope I got all the necessary info in here. Thanks in advance.


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## Pauldo (Jun 22, 2008)

Audigy 2 cards have had their fair share of this problem. You don't see much of it now because everyone is yelling about the x-fi's doing it.

You didn't mention anything about your graphics drivers being updated. You probably have this covered but just in case I thought I should ask? It would be real interesting to see what an nVidia graphics card (and more importantly the nVidia graphics driver) would do to your system.

Also, do you, by chance, have the Wi-fi upgrade on this board. I've seen a lot of problems on Dell systems with audio 'crackling' when the wifi was on. 

Sorry I don't have a quick answer for you as you seem to have covered your bases rather well with this problem.

Pauldo


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## sorcos (Jan 24, 2007)

I used to have an ati radeon 9800 pro (which was present when the crackling first started), but it broke recently which led me to get the x850. For some reason I had problems with the most recent ati drivers at the time, so I am currently using the most up to date omega drivers. I have not tried the most up to date ati drivers dealing with this problem, so I will try them next.

I do believe I can get access to an old nVidia card I can try, so maybe I will give it whirl. I have also read about the Wi-fi problem people were having, but I do not have this upgrade.

As far as Audigy 2 cards having this kind of problem, would they gradually get worse over time? Like I said, I did not have this problem when I first put the card in. I wish I could remember exactly when it started to happen. Would this also explain why it worked on two things that I tried, and then all of a sudden stopped working again.


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## Pauldo (Jun 22, 2008)

My original thought was that it might be your graphics drivers causing the problem. Not sure about your update frequency on your 9800 pro so don't know if the crackling corresponded to an update. But it is rather coincidental that when you disabled the second monitor that the noise stopped.

Are you using two monitors? Or just one and there are two entries in Device manager.

Pauldo


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## sorcos (Jan 24, 2007)

I'm beginning to run to the end of my ideas. Installing the most recent ati drivers did not help. I also took another hard drive, formatted and installed windows. I used all the cds I had when I first got the computer to try and put it in the same state it was in when I got it. However, I have the x850 video card now instead of the 9800 pro. Since I no longer have a working 9800 card to test with, and because the crackling was happening with both cards, I did not install the x850 drivers thinking that maybe ati changed something in all of their drivers that could cause this. I am not sure if leaving out the video card drivers would prevent the crackling or not, but it is still occuring.

I then uninstalled the video card, and replaced it with the nVidia card I was telling you about. It is quite old, but the crackle was still there. I then noticed in PCI Latency Tool that the card latency was set to 248, so I changed it to a couple lower ones, which also did not help.

The ONLY thing I can think of that has remained constant throughout all of this is the BIOS version. I had updated the BIOS some time ago. Since they do not update anything related to my motherboard anymore, it is the most up to date version. Do you think reverting to an older version would help? Ill probably do that next.

And no, I am only using one monitor but have two entries for the ati card in the device manager. One is labeled "Secondary". As far as I know, all ati cards do this in case you want to set up a second monitor.


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## sorcos (Jan 24, 2007)

Well I don't know what else to do. I reverted the BIOS back to every version I could get off of the ASUS website and the problem is still there. I suppose I could try the sound card in another computer to see if the card is bad, but it looks like I am going to just be using the onboard sound for now. Unless of course you have any other suggestions.


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## Pauldo (Jun 22, 2008)

Unfortunately, the only thing that I can say is that I had a system awhile back were I solved this problem by purchasing an audio card with an Envy24 chip in it.

Pauldo


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## sorcos (Jan 24, 2007)

Even though we could not find a solution, thank you for your help Pauldo. When I get around to trying the card in another system, I'll post whether it worked or not.


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