Realtek, Windows 7 64RTM Crackle/static/popping

I had to sign up and share my frustration. None of the fixes I've tried here have worked. One odd thing I've noticed though is that AC3 over s/pdif works fine. LPCM over the same s/pdif does not. I used ffdshow to the same source file and re-encoded the audio on the fly with ffdshow to 640kbps AC3 and it played fine but pops quite noticeably when decoded and sent to my receiver as LPCM.

Hopefully this will get fixed soon enough. I can plug my old Siig audio card in but was hoping to use the 192KHz on-board audio until I can afford a HT|Omega.

Heya i don't know if anyone has suggested this..
but i played around with sound manager and found a fix.. (not all static is gone but most is)

1. Go to sound in control panel
2. click properties on the speakers your using
3. click the dolby tab, untick "natrual bass" - less static
4. now click the advanced tab, click the drop down arrow and reduce bit rate to lowest (16 bit, 44100hz CD Quality)

NOTE this doesn't completely eliminate the static, but it gets rid of most of it.

Hope this helped..

Alright so after a days or so Googling a fix trying almost everything, i came upon a fix so Stupid yet ever more practical.

There's currently a problem with SB cards/nforce chipset/ and 4 gb of ram causing the snap/crackle/pop some people have it some people don't, for those who do try this as it worked for me!

Click start> Accessories>Run.... type msconfig

Select Boot tab>click advanced and set maximum memory to 3990mb.

Reboot and have fun.

I have this problem too, tried all the methods and they didn't work I'm on high performance, disabled all sound effects, running on 16-bit 44100 hz, disabled powerplay, etc.

What I can verify is that the problem completely goes away in older versions of the driver, but I have reason to believe that I NEED a newer driver because it fixes a bsod that I'm having.

What is also strange is that I have the same sound card and OS on my desktop computer and the sound is perfectly fine without having to tweak any settings. This means no disabled all sound effects, and when I tried to look for powerplay in CCC, it wasn't there (the card is HD3850, so it does support powerplay).

Finally, my laptop originally came with Vista and the sound was perfectly fine there too. Only until upgrading to 7 do the problems start with the latest drivers

rangerevo8 said:

i still have the sound problem..
actually mine is not so serious, just some short (0.5 seconds) Crackle/popping happen randomly..not only while playing music in WMP..but also watching youtube video, system sound .etc..

after install and uninstall the Realtek driver (Audio and also NIC just in case it got conflict).. also reinstalled Windows 7 few times (tried x86 and x64..both got same problem).. still no perfect fixes for me..

the best driver for me now is R2.22 (which is the latest realtek HD Audio driver for Vista).. i found out 1 thg.. the driver is dx10.. now i'm thinking that dx11 is the cause of my problem.. realtek driver not really support dx11 completely i guess..

looking forward for future release.. hopefully can fix it..

Used this solution as a temporary fix. I do believe the DX10 theory sounds like the most probable reason. Maybe there is some way to force the newest drivers (2.36, etc.) to render in DX10, just like you can with games?

Heya i don't know if anyone has suggested this..
but i played around with sound manager and found a fix.. (not all static is gone but most is)

1. Go to sound in control panel
2. click properties on the speakers your using
3. click the dolby tab, untick "natrual bass" - less static
4. now click the advanced tab, click the drop down arrow and reduce bit rate to lowest (16 bit, 44100hz CD Quality)

I already tried that. In fact, you supress all the crackling by disabling all sound effects + dolby.

AS this issue is still not fixed, I have contacted realtek Taiwan PC support . They have asked me to dump my audio device data using their internal realtek dump utility. If you can, email pctech@realtek.com and tell them about this issue. The more device dumps they get, the more information they'll have for fixing the problem.

this may be obvious, but it seems the problem really shows up when mixing sounds. with newest drivers i have minor crackling when playing music in itunes. as i add sound sources (eg, games, youtube, IM/windows sounds) the problem becomes exponentially worse.
with the older drivers (2.22), i have no problem with a single audio source at all, itunes plays clearly, but again, as i start a game or recieve an IM the sound crackles.
just my 2c.

ps: im on windows 7 ultimate, 32bit.

I think this worked! It may be too soon to tell, but I'm playing my music just fine right now and for the first time....no popping. Here's hoping that it stays gone.

tbuck said:

Before anyone tries to blame hardware, my same hardware config worked fine under Vista Home Premium x86.

I notice the popping and clicking THE MOST when I turn on iTunes visualization but it happens when iTunes is not even open, like playing through Napster (flash player). The default MS drivers were crackling like hell, I put up for it for weeks and finally did something about it today.

I just downloaded the 2.33 driver from Realtek today, it helped but did not improve.

Someone mentioned an obscure setting further up in this thread so I went poking around in the Control Panel > Sound area.

Under Control Panel > Sound > Playback Devices > Properties on Speakers > Enhancements:

I tried checking "Disable all sound effects", this seemed to help but not fully resolve the pops and clicks.

Next, in the same place I checked "Immediate mode" and it seems to have cleared up all the popping... does this help anyone else? So far so good, I just hope it doesn't come back again, like has happened to everyone else...

I am still using the 2.33 driver.

Realtek PC support has confirmed that the crackling issue is caused by the SiS 671DX+968. chipset present in my laptop. According to them, their drivers are generic, but they cannot guarantee that they work on all systems. Still, they have suggested that I should download a newer beta release (5898), which unfortunately will take a lot of time at 4 KB/s.

I'll report my results as soon as I have them installed in my system.

guys, i haven't read all post.

but what came to mind when i saw words: crackle and realtek.

I had this problem before, that annoying crackling noise.

Fix by low the PC beep volume to 0. (see screenshot below) or just mute it.

for some reason it doesn't crackling anymore.

I know the pc needs the beeping noise when booting up, but it could be the bug realtek is working on.

I hope this fix your crackling problems.