cracking sound ( not due to speaker set )

Hi,

the sound coming out of my speaker set (creative I-trigue 3330) is cracking. Now, I have connected my speaker set to my mp3-player and everything works just fine. When I connect my headphone to the pc, I again experience bad sound.
Conclusion: my speaker set is fine, my pc isn't.

Does anyone know what can be the cause of this issue?

Thanks for your time

Sounds like a driver issue to me.

Go to this website and place your motherboard model in the search box. Once you choose your OS in the popup you'll be able to download your audio drivers.

updated the driver but the sound isn't better

could this be DirectX related? I believe I did a re-install before problems first occurred.

Uncle Seamus said:

updated the driver but the sound isn't better

could this be DirectX related? I believe I did a re-install before problems first occurred.

Click to expand...

This is a rough one, crackling can be caused by so many different circumstances.

It could be a wireless driver conflicting, or the network adapter (ethernet), or even software using up abnormal amount of CPU.

I see you have an nVidea graphics card... is there a process/program running in the background called "powermizer"? A lot of stuff nVidea runs in the background is heavy handed.

Ap

powermizer isn't running as far as I know...I also ran everest to see if my cpu was the cause of the problem, but he seems to be fine
stress test didn't show anything unusual, as far as cpu usage or temperature goes

I do have wireless Internet, but I didn't make recent changes to the adapter

I tried another reinstall of directX but it didn't help
I still believe directX may have something to do with this, since problems started very soon after the reinstall

thanks for looking into it

Uncle Seamus said:

powermizer isn't running as far as I know...I also ran everest to see if my cpu was the cause of the problem, but he seems to be fine stress test didn't show anything unusual, as far as cpu usage or temperature goes

I do have wireless Internet, but I didn't make recent changes to the adapter

I tried another reinstall of directX but it didn't help
I still believe directX may have something to do with this, since problems started very soon after the reinstall

thanks for looking into it

Click to expand...

I doubt if it's Direct X, but anything is possible.

If you right click on the taskbar and select "Start Task Manager", select the Processes tab and you will get a list of (depending on the check box) all processes running or processes associated with your user name login.

Also look under "Administrative Tools" and select "Services" often there are services running that have a negative effects on audio, generally associated with the graphics card.

Also, if you would like to test and see if any devices are causing a problem, open device manager and disable Wireless, or the Network adapter, they're easy enough to re-enable.

Was anything different about the most recent re-install, did you download new drivers for any devices?

Ap

I got a stupid question. Have you checked your headphones on another PC? Perhaps the wiring in them is loose. Sometimes the plugin cable gets worn out, and they begin to fail.

I have disabled my wireless network adapter but the crackling remained

I also checked device manager and two processes seem a little odd:
"aeadisrv.exe" and "smax4pnp.exe"

besides that: I recently updated the driver for my gtx 280 graphics card

@madmaxdata: I have connected my speaker set to my mp3-player with perfect sound as a result

Uncle Seamus said:

I have disabled my wireless network adapter but the crackling remained

I also checked device manager and two processes seem a little odd:
"aeadisrv.exe" and "smax4pnp.exe"

besides that: I recently updated the driver for my gtx 280 graphics card

Click to expand...

Did you have the crackling audio before the graphics card update?


From the web...

"aeadisrv.exe"

"Andrea ADI Filters Service. Service installed by the SoundMAX SupremeFX drivers for SupremeFX based sound cards, or for SupremeFX onboard sound (many ASUS motherboards, for example), fitted with Andrea Electronics noise filtering technology. The only role of this service is to aid the reduction of background noise when you use a microphone. Nothing else depends on this service.

There have been so many problems with this service since its introduction at the beginning of July 2007, and there are still so many problems at the time of writing, 18-Aug-2008, that the only recommendation we can make is to disable this service immediately.

And.....

Smax4pnp.exe is a system process that is part of the SoundMAX software program. It is not necessary for sound to work on your computer but is mainly used to run or add components to the SoundMAX software program. Smax4pnp.exe is not a malicious spyware of malware and generally runs automatically at startup and can be removed safely without affecting the sound on your computer. Unless you use the SoundMAX audio program, it serves no use on your computer.


Ap

It may be an audio driver conflict. You HAVE tried removing the drivers from Control Panel....right?
I have an Asus P5B Deluxe mb with onboard audio chipset. I had windows 7 install it's default drivers for what it detected. In other words, you don't always need to download and install your mb audio chipset or soundcard drivers. Often times, just letting Windows 7 select the driver is sometimes better than downloading and installing specific drivers. I did NOT have to install the SoundMax drivers to have my windows play sounds fine. Windows own set did fine. In fact, I had some problems with no sound on Youtbue videos. I thought it was Google Chromes fault. It wasn't flash or quicktimes fault.
Here's a major tip, if no YouTube video sounds, uninstall and reinstall audio drivers! It sounds like it wouldn't solve it, but it does for some wierd reason. Many many have found this worked.

I think was a codec conflict as to why Youtube sounds didn't play. It may be with you too.

First thing to check is if there is any CPU throttling set in the bios. It goes by different names, depending on motherboard...aka..."Cool n Quiet". Disable it to test. Throttling could also be happening if you are running preloaded software from the manufacturer at Windows start. Check the system tray for something like that, if it exists.

Check for DPC Latency (google it, it will point you to dpclat.exe utility, use it to measure your system's DPC latency). I suspect it's DPC latency problem...

zzz2496

first of all, thanks for all the replies...really appreciate it

I have tried out everything, but nothing seems to work

I'm going to roll back my video driver, but the thing is I was told - here on sevenforums - to update that driver after a recent BSOD
so in a way I hope the crackling remains even after the rollback, otherwise I have to choose between "something that might be music" or an unstable pc

no luck with the nvidia driver

Uncle Seamus said:

no luck with the nvidia driver

Click to expand...

How far back did you go?

I had to take mine back into the 160 series (they're currently at 190 something) to get one that would work... Nvidia admits they're having some driver problems of late and have older versions available on their website... but don't just go back a week or two... go back at least a couple of months...

Also... if your driver is installing that silly 3D video muppingsnarf (PhysX) you might like the results of uninstalling it... It can be removed separately in control panel.

I ran dpclat.exe and it showed some drivers might cause audio drop-outs
I'm going to disable some of them one at a time and see how it goes

hope this was the golden tip

It's not the golden tip, though I hope that it is...

By using dpclat.exe, you can narrow down the culprit... Most of the time, it's network controller driver that's sharing IRQ with some high performance device (another network controller or a display card) OR network controller sharing IRQ with your sound card...

zzz2496

Edit: maybe you can try this: use "Wave" as your audio output device under your music/mp3 player. I previously use DirectSound in iTunes and it crackles like mad when I scroll up/down in Firefox, moving the output to Wave seem to fix the problem.

I'm sorry that it took me this long to find out that my wireless internet adapter is indeed the culprit
I just wasn't patient enough before while testing the different drivers

now do I have to delete and reinstall the driver, or is there more to it?

I just wanted to say Thank God I found this thread. I spent nearly 10 hours uninstalling and installing different drivers for different things before figuring out what it was thanks to dpclat.exe. A program I use to identify hardware called siw.exe was what was causing it for me.

Thanks guys!

Uncle Seamus said:

I'm sorry that it took me this long to find out that my wireless internet adapter is indeed the culprit
I just wasn't patient enough before while testing the different drivers

now do I have to delete and reinstall the driver, or is there more to it?

Click to expand...

If you can, move the device off what current slot it's on, say you plug it to PCIe slot 3, move it to another PCIe slot... I hope it can remedy it... OR you can try my other suggestion, use "Wave" as audio device...

zzz2496