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Weird Static/Crackling in sound

M

mikeyboy714

Member
Recently, my computer started having issues playing sounds; anything it plays becomes staticky or I get a lot of crackling. This occurs while playing MP3s in Winamp, mpegs in PowerDVD, xvids in Zoomplayer, and DVDs, as well as just normal windows sounds. The severity goes in and out, but it seems to be worst when there is a significant amount of CPU load.

I've tried all sorts of things to fix this: flashing my BIOS, resetting to Fail-Safe defaults, updating and reverting my Audigy drivers, updating and reverting the 4in1's, reverting to DX 8.1, all without luck. Playing TV works (the sound comes through Line-In). I installed a fresh copy of windows, and the sound works in that too. So, I guess I've narrowed it down to the way Windows plays sounds.

Now, I don't know what I can do. It's not a codec issue, since this occurs when playing MP2, MP3, AC3, and WAV formats. It's not the Audigy drivers. What else can I try? I don't think I did anything drastic to my computer, and as far as I know it just happened spontaneously, or else I just didn't notice it before. I know I can start using my new copy of Windows, but I'd rather not start all over and try to get all the settings/data transferred correctly.

System Specs:
Creative Audigy
EPoX 8kha+ KT266A Motherboard
AthlonXP 1600+
Windows XP SP-1
VisionTek GF3 Ti500

All drivers are the most recent versions, but I don't think it's a driver issue since I've rolled back the drivers and even done a System Restore to a few days before this started happening.

Edit: One thing that's interesting is that games (well, War3 Frozen Throne and Counter Strike Condition Zero) don't exhibit this crackling. I guess they have their independent methods of playing sounds?
 
I hear that this static thing happens if you use a Creative sound card and ViA chipset. Lately it's happening to me too, but the weird thing is that before I reformatted just a month ago, I had absolutely no problems. I updated both the ViA 4-in-1 drivers and my Creative sound card drivers... still no luck. If anyone knows of a sure solution to this, I'd also be very grateful.
 
I actually discovered the problem. I e-mailed Creative tech support, and they recommended I do a clean sweep and reinstall. Well, that seemed to work...but it wasn't the reason. One of the steps was the disable all startup programs, and that was what did the trick. Turns out that I was using CPU Idle, which was causing the static when "Disable standard cooling" was disabled. Has something to do with ACPI, I'm not really sure what though.

I don't know what it is that triggered this problem. I had updated the BIOS, but even after I flashed it back to an old version I still got that crackling. Anyway, that was the case with mine, if you are using any CPU cooling software I would recommend disabling that, otherwise try starting up with nothing else running. msconfig works nicely to disable all startup programs and non-Microsoft services, then add them back in one by one (or 5 at a time...depending on how many you have).
 
hmm, i'm still not sure what may be causing the problem... it's okay, i can live with it. 🙂 thanks for your help.
 
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