Prevent Sound Going Into "Standby" - D3 Cold?

Hoping somebody can perhpas help with this one.

I am running 7 RTM (x64) on an ASUS P5B, and am using the onboard realtek sound. At present, if the machine is left running, but with no audio being output, the sound is being put into a sort of standby mode. Doing a bit of digging, I reckon it is being put into the "D3 Cold" state, as in the below paragraph :

"Users of Windows 7 may encounter one addition to a familiar piece of hardware: the audio chip. The next-generation operating system will add support for the latest Intel HD Audio low-power specification, which introduces a fourth power state for the driver—D3cold, defined as the lowest unresponsive power state that a codec can go into yet still wake up from. "

Although this undoubtedly is saving power, it causes the speakers to very annoyingly *pop" back into life every time some audio wakes it up again. Don't imagine it can be very good for the speakers either to be honest.

Anybody else experiencing this, or even better, does anybody know if there is a way to prevent the audio going into this D3 Cold state? I have tried all the usual places in the power settings via the control panel, but to no avail.

I know this isn't much help to you but i am having the EXACT same problem.

Hasnt really bothered me too much until yesterday when i was trying to play my X360 through my monitor and using my PC for the sound (Line in) trouble is the sound going into the sleep state, because i couldn't see my desktop (monitor was plugged into the xbox) had to make my PC play a sound to wake it up, did this by making windows come up with an error so it did the usual error beep, then everything would kick back in, for about 10 minutes, grrr!

Really starting to annoy me, I get the "pop" sound as well (Logitech X540 5.1 Speakers) and last thing I want to do is damage them!

I will keep looking for a solution and let you know if I find anything useful. I'm glad it's not just me with this problem, at least it narrows it down :)

Well I searched around for a bit, noted down a few things to try:

Change power plan to Maximum Performance
Untick the "Let applications take priority" on the speaker properties
Reconfigured the speaker set up by setting it all as 2.0 then back to 5.1
Installed realtek v221 drivers (vista drivers)
Installed realtek v222 drivers (vista drivers)

All of these have helped various other people with similar problems, unfortunately none of them worked for me

For now i have a workaround, i rolled back the sound driver to standard windows driver, which has stopped the standby pop thing. It all sounds ok at the moment but I haven't tried any games yet to see if there are any issues with sound quality.