Sound crackles and pops at RANDOM POINTS during ANY SOUND

[Doomish]

I'm about to throw this god damn computer out the window because I am literally at my wit's end here. I can listen to a song perfectly fine and then listen to the same song and the audio will pop and crackle. I could turn the volume on anything up or down and it'll still happen. It happens on EVERYTHING, video game sounds, streaming media, SOUNDS THAT WINDOWS MAKES.

It doesn't always happen, it's completely fucking random, and that's what annoys me.

I am using Windows 7 Ultimate and two desktop SoundMax speakers and every time I ask this question I get the same answers, so to prevent that this time:

[h2]THIS DID NOT HAPPEN WHEN I WAS USING WINDOWS XP AND IT JUST STARTED HAPPENING UPON INSTALLING WINDOWS 7, WHEN GOING BACK TO XP, IT STARTED WORKING PERFECTLY FINE AGAIN, IT ONLY HAPPENS ON WINDOWS 7 IN GENERAL[/h2]

Please for the love of god help me so that I don't take an axe to my computer case.

[tratzzz]

UPDATE THE FUCKING DRIVERS THEN.

Meh.

[Doomish]

They are as updated as they can get.

[tratzzz]

Your sound drivers? Sure?

Are you using onboard or external sound card?

Google for drivers and install em again.

[Doomish]

This is interesting. Downloaded the Windows 7 drivers from the official site of my sound card and it told me this:

[img]http://i52.tinypic.com/33xdd2q.png[/img]

Which is completely retarded because [I]I downloaded it from the Windows 7 drivers section of the site.[/I]

[editline]4th July 2011[/editline]

So that you know, I have gone through this all before. In fact it's happening the exact same way as it did the last time. The next step is for people to start telling me "Run it in compatibility mode", and when that doesn't work, people are going to tell me to reinstall the software for the sound device in general, and when that doesn't work people are going to start telling me to go back to XP because it was solid and it works, at which point people are going to start making fun of me for using XP again. It's a vicious cycle, you see.

[Armotekma]

Disregard people laughing at you for using XP then?

[Doomish]

but it's not about people laughing at me for using xp, it's about the fact that [I]my sound worked perfectly fine when i was using xp and now it doesn't and i am still pissed about it because that means that it is just having a problem because it can[/I]

[Doomish]

I'm running 32 bit Win7, so yes, I downloaded the x86 drivers. The thing is, I looked, and Windows 7 isn't supported for the card I use. The stupidest part about it is that they still have downloads up for Windows 7 drivers that are supposed to work (they don't). I tried downloading the Vista drivers (I had to do that upon the first install of Win7 on this PC to get the sound to work in general) and that worked, but the sound crackling still happens.

I suppose I can live with it if nobody else has any ideas. I'm building a new computer soon anyway, one that won't have a terrible sound card in it. :smith:

[editline]4th July 2011[/editline]

[img]http://i51.tinypic.com/24cxlhl.png[/img]

So as you can see by Speccy, SoundMAX is basically everything my computer uses for sound. It's sad that there's probably nothing I can do about it.

[SonicXVe]

Have you tried changing the sound quality in its Playback Device properties? Increasing\Decreasing the quality might yield some more desirable audio.

[MIPS]

I have not trusted integrated sound chipsets ever. I have always been working off a Sound Blaster going back all the way to when systems still came with ISA slots.
I had a crackling issue before which boiled down to a hardware resource issue with VIA chipset USB/firewire cards and buggy Windows drivers. I ended up replacing the cards with better NEC USB/firewire chipset ones and moved the Sound Blaster to the neighboring PCI slot so it sat elsewhere in the resource pool and it went away but by the sounds of it (pun not intended) you are not having the same problem.
Just find an old Live or Audigy card and see if the problem goes away.

[SilentKyle]

I am pretty sure this is DPC latency. I had the same problem. Google DPC Latency checker and when you are hearing the pops and cracks run the program. If its showing red and yellow bars then that's your problem.

[Lopkin]

try googling "network performance throttling", might help