Windows 7: Sound cuts out

I have this intermittent problem, where the sound cuts out for a fraction of a second (it's not muting it, it seems to lose the signal for a split second). It seems to happen when connected through SPDIF to my receiver (I haven't had it happen with Headphones connected). I am almost certain it is not my receiver; although almost 8 yrs old, it works great and has never cut out otherwise.



I have a fairly new build with Asus P6T Deluxe V2 mobo (using it for sound), and recently bought an SPDIF cable (25' digital coax) from newegg to connect my computer to my receiver.

Any ideas what is happening?

Have you updated the sound drivers from Asus?

A 25' coax seems like an awful long run for audio but I could be wrong...

Drivers are up to date. Yeah, I didn't want to have to go with the 25' cable, but given my setup, 15' (the next shortest length) was just a bit too short. It is Digital Coaxial though, not optical.

I also suffer this problem but I use the Fiber optic cable 6ft. My receiver is a Yamaha its about 4 years old. My audio drivers are up to date as well.
Any ideas would be great.

Might want to try downloading the DPC Latency checker.

DPC Latency Checker

Here's a blurb from the site.

Ap

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Thesycon’s DPC Latency Checker is a Windows tool that analyses the capabilities of a computer system to handle real-time data streams properly. It may help to find the cause for interruptions in real-time audio and video streams, also known as drop-outs. The program supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP x64, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 x64, Windows Vista, Windows Vista x64, Windows 7, Windows 7 x64.
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I too have issues with audio cutting out in Windows 7. I built an media box a couple of months ago and was running Linux with no audio issues at all (I had video problems but that is another story). As soon as I installed Windows 7 x64 I have had problems with audio cutting out when no media is running (like between youtube videos). I have to cycle my amp's power or inputs to get the sound back on. This was the same if I was using coaxial or optical. It has never done this during the playing of a video or movie, only while there is no media playing.

I ran DPC Lantency checker and in 5 minutes and it ran below 70us for the most part but did peak at 466us and at a few hours - 780us. I don't know if that is enough to cause problems with my amp.

Runnning Windows 7 x64
Intel mb with dual core atom onboard sound
2gig ram

Ajax

Probably not enough to cause dropouts.

Have you checked Taskmanager/Performance Tab - "Resource Monitor" to see if you're getting any CPU hits that coincide with the dropouts?

Are all your motherboard drivers/inf files up-to-date?

Ap

Yes I did update sound drivers off the top. I was looking at some videos off of youtube to see if there are any cpu spikes (100% or 0%) but it is hard to tell as those little atom cores are running all over the place. I do wonder at which two of the four cores displayed are the actual ones and which are the hyper threads? I would guess 1 and 3 are the real ones. I will have to do some more simple sound test to check this cpu spike theory out further.

Ajax