Intermittent buzzing/crackling/static noise when playing audi

I'll cut to the chase....

Lenovo T430 Laptop, Window 7 sp1, 64 bit

Just today this started. I haven't had any issues before. When playing anything audio (e.g., YouTube, ZeroPunctuation, MP4, MP3, any audio) there is the occasional buzzing/static/cracking noise (kinda like what you'd hear fiddling with a headphone jack) coming from the speakers. It happens regardless of volume (hardware volume, or software setting), or whether I'm using the laptops speakers or headphones (I've tried with various headphones, including some quality BOSE) making me conclude it's not the tweeter or cone of the speaker itself.

So far I've tried updating all the platforms like Flash to see if the issue was that. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Realtek driver, disabling/renabling through Device Manager and restarting, and even using the Troubleshoot Audio Playback.

This is driving me insane as having good audio is a major component of my daily activities. Thank for the help

So I am in my office today working and have audio playing. There was no intermittent crackling noise or popping. This still happens at home, but it didn't replicate at school.

The ONLY difference in variable is that I'm hooked up to different WiFi (but popping would happen with MP3 or video stored on the computer itself), the AC adapter is in a different outlet, and the computer is in a physically different location.

I have no idea why?

So it appears that it ONLY happens when at home. It doesn't happen anywhere else (my office, etc)... It's driving me nuts and I have no idea what's causing it. I called tech support and they are baffled as they've never heard of this issue before. How could being connected to wifi cause this? Again, it happens regardless of the audio coming through computer speakers or headphones

So the problem went away and now it returned, and it's happening even at work

please help!

I have same problem. I even reinstalled windows.. its same... I didn't had this before.. like 1 week ago

Please use either the DPC Latency Checker or LatencyMon tool to determine the real cause of the audio buzzing/crackling problems.

try updating the realtek audio drivers as well as updating the WiFi drivers.

neither one of those programs are helpful.

consider the engineering of the components on the motherboard.
capacitors, resistors, diodes, they let particles in & they send particles out.
they fail when they stop doing that.
if there were particles not allowed to get through you'd see data corruption if the operating system didn't crash (or the entire system itself).
thus they can't clock drift.

besides the processors & ram, what else has a clock?
the pll crystal.

we know particles are either attracted to or opposed from other things magnetically.

if the electrons were attracted to the crystal, then they'd clump up & wouldn't go through.

therefore they must be opposed.
how do you send electrons towards something it is opposed to?
you use inductance (a magnetic pull) .. use it once and the two particles of opposition are neutral - use it twice and there's more pull than push, thus getting the electrons to go through.

simply passing an electron past a crystal isn't going to set any sort of clock, because they will simply flow right past it.
if a stationary crystal had the characteristics to halt the flow, it would be radio active rather than a crystal - and even then, the radio active particles would need to match every single particle going past it.
and even then, the radio active particles would need to be signature engineered to release an electron every time another electron was added - but there's no way to design a flow that is steady, thus the entire design is worthless.

now if the opposition from the electrons caused a crystal to spin around as it floated about in the center of it's cage.. then the crystal could be comparable to a butterfly on(in) a throttlebody of an engine.

two things could happen with a butterfly type situation.
1. the crystal could become weak in magnetic force & every once in a while rub some part of it's cage & slow down the stream enough to create 'clock drift'.
2. the crystal isn't touching any part of it's cage, but it is multi-threaded & will twist to allow another thread to go through - and if the timing isn't right of the additional thread, then the first thread is going to suffer; again causing a 'clock drift'

you know how the processor works with scheduling?
basically a processor only has enough room to process a specific amount at any given time.
if you want to run multiple processes on the computer, those different programs need to share the processor.
scheduling is the organization of time for those different programs to use the processor a little bit each, to keep the flow of execution going between different processes.

there's more than one way to do scheduling, such as shortest thing first.
you can read more about it here: Operating System - Process Scheduling

the truth is, any operating system and|or driver should be able to compensate for busy scheduling.
it is a necessity to keep consumers away from fear that their hardware is broken and|or that they are being hacked.
thus hiding such problems are vital to the industry.
because a computer system that can't compensate basically hasn't passed quality assurance.
yet there's billions of people using the same operating system & hardware & drivers without the problem - thus if the problem was simply a design flaw of a driver and|or operating system, there'd be more people with the same problem.

if a diode was going out, then it would allow electrons to flow in the opposite direction of the design & then the computer would crash because the electron would be flagged as a hack.
and even if it wasn't, the system would become totally confused about what to do with the extra electron & thus it would freeze at least.

but besides, i've had audio crackles regardless of whether there was a high load on the system or simply not touching anything but letting music play in the background without any other pages open & the crackles continued to happen.

then there's the fact of people trying to say it is simply a buffer underrun, yet i can change the size of the buffer in virtual audio cable as well as with asio4all, and when choosing the 'allow pull mode (waveRT)' option of the realtek HD soundcard, that is supposed to allow us to change the buffer size of the soundcard too.
that debunks those claims, because i've raised & lowered those buffers without it helping.

as i said, without a load on the system - the scheduling isn't taxed with burden, thus those buffers aren't experiencing any stress or delay from other processes.

besides, i've gone months without audio crackles before & it didn't matter if i was simply listening to audio reading an article, or playing a video game while listening to music, or playing a video game without the music, or watching a movie that is graphics card accelerated .. the audio crackles have happened (and haven't happened) while doing those things.

the only way scheduling can be the problem is if the processor is at 100% usage & needs more - or there's a secret flag being thrown that tells the processor to ignore it's normal scheduling routine.
but considering there's always supposed to be some percentage of processor free for other tasks, it can't be the first.
therefore it would be some spy system interferring with something we own if a flag was being thrown.
then the fact that their system isn't working correctly only multiplies the problem.