Vista sound cracking

I am a sound engineer with a brand new Dell Lattitude with Windows Vista Business, also experience the crackling sounds. If I rip audio using Windows Media Player 11 into wav or mp3 or wma formats, the audio plays back with no crackling from the hard drive of the laptop. If I burn this file to a CDR and play it on my home stereo there is no crackling. But if I play it back from the laptop's DVD drive the pops, clicks and glitches come back randomly.

I have tried every sound setting combination in the control panel different playback sample rates and bit-depths with no improvement. I am waiting to try installing uypdated drivers for the DVD drive. Has anyone had the crackling problem for audio played off the hard drive? For me the crackle and stutter seems to be more common on things that use cpu or network, like my slingbox player. That said, it happens with everything, even occasionally with system notification sounds.

The machine shipped with XP, which did not have this problem at all. So, I'm confident that it is not a hardware problem. I did a clean install of Vista. It really sucks. Otherwise, I really like this machine.

This makes me want to avoid Dell next time, though. When I go to device manager and disable my wireless card, absolutely all crackling and stuttering goes away.

The sound is totally solid. Re-enable it and the problem comes back. I've seen comments on other forums that seem to indicate a correlation between these Tried 2 different sound cards internal and a M-Audio firewire and both XP and Vista drivers for all of them.

Hi, I also have an M and am having audio crackling problems. The issue appears to be with Vista's new Audio system. The Crackiling noise is caused by the skipping of the media being played due to the CPU being used by other tasks. One of the most noticible ones being Dells Quickset, which uses up exessive power every time it changes the colour or intensity of the LEDs. That was the first thing I tried. For me, it had no effect on the problem.

The only thing that has made any impact was disabling the draft-n wireless card, and that fixed the problem completely. Thanks for all support guys. I have an office software program called SuperVoice which is an answering machine, fx machine Email and does athing you would think of needing running an office. My Intel motherboard has Sigma Tel Audio onboard. I miss many messages because of the crackling and also the modem cannot identify a hang up.

Sooooo, is my only option to switch to XP? I only have 7 days until my 30 day grace period is up with Dell. After that it may be costly to switch. The processor should be plenty to handle Vista, correct? Or is it possible that with this 1. Just got my new Dell Inspiron with Vista bit and have experienced exactly the same probs with the crackeling sound as many of you have.

I went to the Windows Mobility Center and switched the battery status to high performance instead of Dell's recommended, and that actually erased the probs for me.. I had to disable the "a" wireless band too.

But the crackling seems to have gone away In theory my WiFi throughput is now lower windows reports Mbps instead of , as I recall , but I can't tell the difference. I would try that too, but I don't have a WiFi Connection, I have a wired connection so if anyone found any more websites, or any more information would be greatful! Onboard audio was crackling badly. Bought x-fi card. Didn't help. Called Dell Tech. They said the mobo had a short. Dell sent a tech to replace mobo.

Didn't help, so they sent a brand new XPS. Two weeks later same problem with audio. My brother read this thread so I decided to disable my Linksys Draft-N card and guess what? No more problem with the audio, however, I once I enable it to surf the net it resurfaces. I find it hard to believe that the Dell techs do not know what is going on. There is definitely some issue of compatibility with the sound and Draft-N. It's not your wireless I have the same issue and they told me they've been aware of the problem ever since April when they started providing an upgrade to Dell users who have this kind of audio setup.

That's not to say they won't find a fix eventually, though I've had issues with the card ever since I bought the machine last year when it had XP.

The real source of this fiasco is that SigmaTel don't create drivers for the cards anymore, Dell do. Dell apparently don't even have any idea what's causing the incompatibility! If I re-enable it the problem comes back immediately.

In Device Manager choose the In the dropdown choose Disable Obviously you shouldn't have to do this. But, for me this workaround did work, it's easy to do, and I haven't had any side effects.

TBH I'm not holding my breath that this driver will ever be correctly fixed. Unfortunately that doesn't help me, either. If anything, the patches released yesterday for Vista have made the audio quality worse, causing the sound to now crackle almost all the time!

It would've been nice if Dell had done their job right in the first place, but the fact remains is the card they provide in these laptops is auful. Oh wait a minute Intel does allow you to change settings to what band you can use simultaneously, but it is still crackling even without the A-Band in use.

At least it was worth a shot. I have noticed, however, that since the upgrade, WMP 11 for Vista has trouble playing all sound and video files from-start-to-end smoothly. It could be a related issue I bought the Dell m about a month ago It is apparent through all audio sources Changing the enhancements does not help the problem The sounds is almost like the speakers are blown.

It occurs every seconds. Is this the sound that so many of you are talking about? It really worries me because if it is a blown speaker I would like to have it replaced as soon as possibe. I have only had the volume remotely high one time I doubt its a blown speaker. And if it was Some of the advice on this board has worked for me. I disabled the "a" band on my wireless, and changed the battery setting to the highest quality.

Oddly enough, the crackling went away. I don't know why this worked, but at least I can listen to my music without getting angry. Well that doesn't make me feel any easier. If Dell are providing an upgrade to Vista that actually causes physical damage to the hardware, they should stop now and just provide them with a retail copy.

I remember when manufacturers provided customers with unaltered versions of NT I disabled the A-Band and it now works perfectly for me! We definitely need to spread the word of this quick fix out. You're a life saver, thank you!

Is there any vaio users, who has solved this problem? Disabling the "A" band in the wireless network settings solved the problem for me too. It causes a lot of problems, one of them being the crackling speakers. For months now, manufacturers have been pimping the new N-Band for wireless because of its efficiency over the A-Band. Granted it's a faster connection, but we've tried an 'N' receiver at home and it just simply isn't ready yet much like Vista, apparently , as it's still experimental and most providers won't even use the tech for that reason.

Now A-Band is a very old frequency in terms of the telecommunications industry, so maybe Microsoft has decided they don't need it and that's why it causes a driver conflict Besides, the company is mothballing the distribution of XP next year, so what does that tell you!

Disabling the A band didn't work for me, But disabling A and B did work! I'm on vista. It's amazing how much money one can spent on a quality Dell notebook and not get the basic services to work such as playing music together with wirelessing.

I just had my motherboard switched out believing that maybe the first generation was defective and maybe they got it right. They didn't. To me, shipping an integrated system requires that extensive testing be done and the old-fashioned rule of law that Dell only support the operating systems it ships with is completely ridiculous. Dell, SigmaTel, and Microsoft all share blame here, but primarily Dell, who elected to utilize this company's product.

I have an XPS M, not a low-ticket item. If something doesn't work, I expect work to be done quickly to resolve it. I would LOVE to explore a class action lawsuit possiblity in that Dell is knowingly shipping defective products.

If you have any interest of knowledge in this course of action, please reply to cdogdigsu hotmail. I just received my new Dell Vostro laptop a couple weeks ago - and I am having the same crackling problem with music and movies. I am running Windows XP service pack 2 - not Vista. I did not want to deal with the headaches from Vista just yet.

I do have the SigmaTel. Any suggestions for a repair with Windows XP? I have read many threads and see that this has been a problem for quite a while. I'm frustrated that Dell has still not corrected this problem.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! There is so much misinformation or unanswered support threads about the cause of the distorted audio in a VMware virtual machine.

You need to login to view this posts content. Oct 6, Stop hovering to collapse Click to collapse Hover to expand Click to expand Feedback for VMware XP users Jun 4, 1 0 0. Yeah I'm gonna need some info on how to roll back that update They break something every time, I should have known better.

And its only getting worse with every update. Jul 20, 3 2 0. Hello All, this XP guest machine sound problem in VMWare workstation has been giving me grief and agony for the last few days Nothing is perfect, I get it. Even the VMware audio tray fix and the timer did not work out. So, I rolled back to VMWare No more crackling sounds in XP.

Thank you very, very much for all the suggestions and workarounds given. Beginning to wonder if this may have relevance, because afterwards, I tried playing the same audio files in WMP and there were no apparent hiccups whatsoever in the music, even with the DVD drive installed.

The DPC latency readout of the system was still very similar to that above. There are a few threads in the Apple forums regarding iTunes 8. This seems to have worked for me. I am now listening to second song with no cracle or pops.

I have battled with this issue and now I can blindly install Vista and Drivers on E My drivers and sequence are as follows:. Not even NSS.

R Chipset. R Display. R NIC Ethernet. EXE 5. R IDT Audio. EXE 6. R Intel WiFi R Touchpad. R Intel x Gigabit Platform Application. I enforced the downgrade process in Vista. Since then no major cracling noticed. I must have heard two minor cracks just like old vinayl record playing in between but nothing major. Fingers crossed. At least now. I shall keep you posted. Browse Community. Laptops General - Read Only. Turn on suggestions. Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.