Windows 7: My audio is skipping, and cracking really bad.

I can barely watch youtube videos because the sound is skipping and cracking so bad

I have the latest Realtek HD audio codec, I even tried uninstalling the driver and re-installing it

Is there maybe a solution of a something different that Realtek?

This isn't really a new problem, but I think its got worse since i've had windows 7

I have 2 gigs of RAM, and I have no programs open except for the video

I also hear the problem when Im listening to songs with limewire, but thats understandable because limewire is a ram hog



Music is literally my life, and Im on my computer a lot, and its really a drag if I cant listen to music and such without it completely pooping out

First thing I always ask about crackling audio is does the same crackling and popping happen when you listen to cd audio or mp3 from a physical cd or dvd drive? Could be your SATA driver working inefficiently if so.

There are so many potential causes for this. First thing to check is audio driver. If latest, try older. If older, try latest.

Visit your motherboard manufacturer's site or Gateway and update the drivers for everything they offer for Win 7.

Your lan driver could be in conflict with your audio driver. Does it only happen when packets are being sent and/or received?

Defragment your hard drive(s).

Go into your bios and disable every port not in use, like serial and/or parallel. Disable the floppy drive too, unless you actually use the thing. Windows will boot faster.

If you have a firewire (IEEE 1394) adapter in use or not in use, change it to a generic driver. Sometimes in these cases, there's success in untying certain services to each other in the registry and then disabling one. I'll tell about that later too if it gets to that.

I see you have an old video card. The driver you're using for that could be not so great causing interference in your pc operating well.

I've also fixed machines with this problem by going into bios and generally making sure things are correct. Machines with hard drive or controller misconfigurations or that haven't been optimized (i.e. set wrong) can exhibit this behavior.

You may have some luck by changing the latency for the audio using the PCI Latency tool from Guru3d.com, although this is a long shot. http://downloads.guru3d.com/download...t=951#download

I'll think of other causes for ya if nothing I've said already has helped. Good luck.

I too have a problem with popping and crackling sound when playing music and watching a film. It was present on Vista and is the same on Win 7, yet there was no sign of the problem on XP, with the same setup and hardware and driver. I've tired newer and older drivers but it seems like it's a Vista / Win 7 issue...and it's really irritating

Hello everyone, I was inspired to register to let people know the cure for a audio problem I was having with windows 7. After playing media centre with DTV2000 h tv the audio would slowly drop to a crackle and drop out after initially working okay on win 7/64 home premium.

I then upgraded to ultimate 64 (wanted the virtualization xp for other reasons) and found the same issue. Then installed new Kworld dual dvb-t 2 card with win 7 64 drivers available..same issue.

After much, much hair pulling and late 4 am nights, installing reinstalling etc etc I finally got to the bios ....!!!

The issue appears to be that on giga boards and I suspect on others there is intelligent throttling for the CPU. It appears win 7 and maybe vista has its own cpu throttling and if selected in bios the two conflict with the end result the audio throttles to nothing after crackling and also appears to have a intermittent effect on the video as well, certainly has an effect in the media centre....so turn off the bios CIA throttling off or whatever it is called on your board...All boards now work...

Hope this helps someone out there have some better nights sleep...

Thanks for your post Technoart, I've tried to go into the Bios, mine is Phoenix but there is not option at all that could relate to throttling.

I have undervolted my laptop using Rightmark CPU utility, as I found previously my laptop was throttling the cpu while gaming on both Vista and XP, so now throttling doesn't occur but the sound still crackles as if I was playing an old record

Turn off undervolting and select the high performance power profile. See how it goes.

Control panel | power options. Show additional plans.

Still no joy...already have the laptop on High Performance, turned the undervolting utility off, then tried it with 'performance on demand' and then 'maximum performance' and it pops and crackles on all of the above settings

Perhaps a bios update is available for your motherboard as has worked in this thread?

Audio skipping on an Acer Aspire 1520

I've got it updated to the latest BIOS update from Acer

Update: I think I may have solved the crackling problem by using the latest drivers from the Realtek site.

The strange thing is that previously Realtek drivers would not give me the full functionality of my laptops sound card e.g it wouldn't interact with the built in subwoofer which meant I had to use the Acer one but with the latest drivers it recognises the subwoofer and gives me the Acer HD Audio Manager which was only present with Acers customised Realtek driver previously.

Anyone with a 6920G I would recommend using the latest Win 7 drivers from Realtek as they work flawlessly with the laptop.