Solved Random Hard Crash when audio files are played

So, I built a new pc a week ago and have been having some technical issues with it. I am running windows 7 home premium (sp1) on an [FONT=inherit !important][FONT=inherit ! important]asus[/FONT][/FONT] m5a99x mobo, which has the realtek alc-892 audio chip as its on-board sound.
Its pretty random when I get a crash, but it seems to only happens when I am playing audio, whether it be windows media player or a game or vlc. It is always a hard crash where I cant ctrl-alt-del and i dont get a BSOD. The audio will get distorted or turn off and the mouse and http://www.sevenforums.com/# become unresponsive. As for the random part, sometimes i can get away with up to 6 hours of audio use before the crash; the music played overnight once, but sometimes its right when I go into a game or WMP.
The events viewer has no recollection of crash stats, so it just shows my hard [FONT=inherit !important][FONT=inherit !important]reboot[/FONT][/FONT] as a kernel power error 41. I have tried these things with no apparent change: updating BIOS, updating South Bridge, installing k-lite codec packs (both x86 and x64), uninstalling realtek to run windows audio only, updating realtek, using older drivers for realtek, reinstalling mobo cd, and a few more.
The funny thing is, if I dont use audio everything works fine. I disable realtek hd in [FONT=inherit !important][FONT=inherit !important]devices [/FONT][/FONT]and I can run it forever. Just no sound. I use my pc for recording in my studio and really want to get it up and running, so I can continue to make music. Thanks for the help!

I've been having the exact same problems you describe- random hard crashes that only seem to happen when playing audio, and no amount of fiddling about with drivers will fix it. Sometimes they happen only after a minute or so, sometimes I can have audio going all day and no problems. But it's only ever with audio.
It could be the sound card. I have a different mobo (Asus p8z68-v) but it has the same on-board sound card. I'm thinking of buying a cheap usb sound card, see if that works. I've read in other forums it fixed some other realtek related crashes (Battlefield 3 crashes with realtek). Might try that in a couple of days if no one posts any other fixes. I'll make sure to post my results.

Hi, I solved the crashes by buying a dedicated pci soundcard and completely disabling the onboard realtek audio card and driver.