Annoying Sound issues with DVDs

[Labrador]

Hello all,

I have an annoying problem with my PC. When watching DVDs in 5.1 surround sound I get a little crackling/popping noise from every few seconds when the FL and or FR speakers are in use, but never from the centre speaker on its own, even after 10 or 20 minutes of dialogue. In theory I might suspect a short or some other fault with those two speakers, but they work beautifully for hours on end when playing music in itunes. I've got the latest drivers for motherboard and soundcard, but to no avail. The soundcard is a Terratec Aureon 7.1 (set to 5.1) with Teufel 5 speaker set up. All of the right noises come out of the right speakers, but like I said there's those infuriating crackles when a DVD uses the satellites. Other specs are AMD FX8300, 16GB of ram and 480GB Crucial SSD. There's onboard sound, but I've set it to disabled. Graphics card is a GT630. I've done some latency checks and uploaded the results; it looks like several drivers are problematic, but what's the reason?

 

[fireberd]

I would try the on-board sound, just to confirm whether its the sound card or some other problem. You have to start somewhere and that is a good starting point. Disable or even better remove the separate sound card for testing.

There is not a "one fix" for these types of problems, each one can be a different problem.

As you have a Gigabyte motherboard, do you have the Gigabyte EasyTune installed? This is a known cause of high DPC. When I first built my new recording studio desktop, I used a Gigabyte motherboard and when I installed the drivers from the Gigabyte install disc, I just installed everything. I was getting popping/crackling and dropouts on the audio. In my case, the EasyTune program was the problem. As soon as I uninstalled (and rebooted) the DPC Latency and the sound problems went away.

 

[Labrador]

Hi fireberd, thanks for replying. I've tried the onboard sound, but no real difference, still those pops and crackles. Easytune was installed, but I've now removed it; the two latency checkers are showing just the same results however. The DPC graph is very consistent, whith every third bar being a spike between around 1500us and 2500us.

 

[Labrador]

Scratch the last post. I hadn't rebooted at that point, but now I have and it's sorted! I'm amazed, how on earth does Easytune manage to make half a dozen drivers misbehave? The top 5 or 6 on Latencymon are all now 0.xx rather than the big figures on the chart in my first post, and DPC checker is a sea of green

 

[fireberd]

Yes, the EasyTune is working in the background and is a known cause. When I built my recording studio system and had the problem, one of the techs at a company that specializes in building recording studio PC's zeroed in on the EasyTune.