Snap Crackle Pop, and no its not my cereal

[eedmond]

Does it crackle when you are in safe mode?

Do you have anything electrical nearby?

Unknown if it pops in safe mode. I can only get it to pop while playing Horizons so far and I don't think it will run in safe mode.

Does it pop if the light is off? 2nd computer shouln't matter - you're concerned about electrical equipment with transformers. I would experiment with turning off other equipment on the same circuit.

I will try turning off my light and see if it pops. I don't know if these have transformers but on my desk I have my 21" monitor with my Tower right next to it. Next to my tower is my subwoofer (Sony SRS-D300) next to that is my HP Deskjet 932C and next to it is my APC Back-UPS XS 1000 battery back up. Next to that is my Alarm Clock and the other only other thing in my room that draws electricity is my Lightbulb which I stated earlier as a Fluorescent.

I know Battery back ups are not supposed to be near computer towers. The manual says about 2-3 feet away. Mine is approx. 3-4feet away. I am not sure if all my cords will reach it if I move it farther but I could attempt that.

-Eric

[eedmond]

Just tried it with my lights off. It just so happend to have the worst poping and crackling fit when I started the game since I got my Audigy 2. It was near as bad as when I had my Audigy 1 in it.

-Eric

[confus-ed]

The more you say the less I think its outside interferance ...

[eedmond]

Any ideas what it could be? Possible the PCI bandwidth issue that Creative says is a possibility? I do not know the PCI bandwidth information and what a SATA PCI card can eat of it. I have been listening hard to my HD when it happens and it seems to me that it is always at a time when the HD is being accessed. Perhaps I should mess around with the PCI Latency timings in my bios from the standard 32 to something else? This is all uncharted territory for me. Any suggestions would be helpful.

-Eric

[confus-ed]

Any ideas what it could be? Possible the PCI bandwidth issue that Creative says is a possibility? ...

Absolutley ! I said so earlier .. if its VIA chipset try the latency patch I suggested earlier, if its 'a.n.other' chipset 'tinkering' with latency values if you have 'em in bios (many don't) might help, but its gonna be 'trial & error' & might result in a few 'no boot' situations or 'other strange behaviour' - last resort for that methinks ...

You may like to try disconnecting your machine from the outside world, disabling AV & firewall s/w (which are both 'bad' for 'unexpected bursts of cpu activity') & any other TSRs (terminate & Stay Resident) showing in your 'crash box' (when you press ctrl&alt&del). Once that list is 'minimised' try & see if you still get 'snap, crackle & pop' ... this'll give an idea of whether it is latency or just a 'badly setup' beast or 'greedy' s/w ... we can do some 'priority twiddles' maybe to stop any 'hungry' processes munching all the cpu time.

Ooooo ! ... another thing - is all the soundblaster 'bloatware' installed ? That has one hell of an impact !

[slgrieb]

Forget the VIA patch. The N in A7N8X stands for NForce 2. Eedmond, did you try pulling the Audigy and using the onboard sound? If you don't hear the noise with the Realtek on-board sound, I think I'd have to say bad sound card.

[imagoon]

I'm with confused here. I had a live and an audigy. They both had issues with pops clicks etc esp with anything that used the PCI bus hard, like the HDD's. This is a well known issue with sb lives and audigys. I finally got the Hercules Game theatre XP 5.1 and never had an issues after that. BTW there are some drivers that attempt to fix it but the SB cards are just not 100% compatible with the PCI standards. The tweaks they used did cause issues with some boards but others you cant get rid of the noise.

~Chris

Ahhhh ! ... an 'I hate soundblasters' thread ... count me in ..

First thing ... we keep on 'wittering' about leads & connectors & speakers ... well standard audio cables are a bit like a big ariel, if there is any exterior interferance & they aren't well shielded they very kindly amplify it & project it out the speakers, good 'firm clean' contacts are a 'must' too.

The way to decide whether the card is at fault or the machine is either seperate the pc & cables from any possible interfereance (not really that practical) or why don't you use fibre optic cabling ? No interferance at all there from outside (alternatively 'well shielded cabling' if your speakers aren't digital).

Now as for whats going on in the pc ... its to do with pci bus signalling & how Soundblasters do it & priorities of request handling. There's also a whole hardware vs software decoding thing going too ...

Your onboard sound is almost certainly completely software based, that's where the cpu does pretty much all the work & the card itself has no memory or Codecs built in ... Your Audigy though is hardware based & has codec chips to do the decoding & a memory buffer to 'save up jobs' for the cpu as & when required.

Now if the 'geniuses' at soundblaster wrote drivers that complied with pci 2.1 specification as well as 'adjusting their cards' so they actually did comply instead of 'nearly' (they comply to some other related standard apparently) then when they flushed buffers everything would get done right, but because they 'tinkered' with the priorities for sound processing everything gets out of whack & you get PCI latency issues & snap crackle pop ! This is worse/better dependant on the motherboard bios, some are 'good' many though ... urrgh !

I don't know what to say now, this could well be interferance, or it could well be that you've 'fluked' a sucession of motherboards that don't like soundblasters!

If this is a VIA chipset board then there's a PCI latency patch by 'George' aka the 'soundblaster patch' over on www.ViaArena.com

[eedmond]

Forget the VIA patch. The N in A7N8X stands for NForce 2. Eedmond, did you try pulling the Audigy and using the onboard sound? If you don't hear the noise with the Realtek on-board sound, I think I'd have to say bad sound card.

Yes I tried the onboard sound and it still cracked and popped but about 10% of the time what the SB Audigy 1 did. The Audigy 2 is about 40% of what the Audigy 1 did.

I will try disableing all running process in the background. Will let you know by monday.

Thanks,
Eric

[eedmond]

Problem Resolved but not fixed. I yanked out my Audigy 2 and returned it to the Computer Shop that I bought it from. He sold me a Audigy 2 NX (external USB 2.0) and said if I have problems with this that I can return it too. I just got it installed and tried it out in the game. The only time the sound messes up is when the game is not in the foreground. I pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL to see what my CPU was doing. Internet Explorer was eating up about 25-30% of my CPU and the game was getting the rest (IE is the game's launcher unfortunatly). I decided to do a test and set the priority of the game to realtime and the problem with the sounds went away. Of course that caused nothing else to work so I had to reboot but now it is just a CPU issue when the game is in the background. So far I am pleased with it but I have a heavy night of gaming and we shall see how it holds up tonight and tomorrow.

-Eric

[slgrieb]

Uh, eedmond, what processor are you running? Or did you already post it. Just curious. I seem to be having multiple senior moments today.

[eedmond]

Uh, eedmond, what processor are you running? Or did you already post it. Just curious. I seem to be having multiple senior moments today.

Guess I didn't. I am running AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.0G) cpu.

-Eric

[slgrieb]

Thanks! Most of the issues with noise in SoundBlaster cards revolve around insufficient CPU speed or limited memory. Your problem still puzzles me, since your system is well above the recommended system. 'Course, I have had some games where the actual hardware requirements greatly exceeded the stated requirements. Like Neverwinter Nights.

[eedmond]

Thanks! Most of the issues with noise in SoundBlaster cards revolve around insufficient CPU speed or limited memory. Your problem still puzzles me, since your system is well above the recommended system. 'Course, I have had some games where the actual hardware requirements greatly exceeded the stated requirements. Like Neverwinter Nights.

I am begining to think that it is a game issue. Because my Audigy 2 NX is popping as well. Not nearly as bad as the internal versions but once every 10minutes or so. I will install some of my other games like Half-Life, Morrowind and Ghost Recon and see if I can get them to do it too.

-Eric

[eedmond]

The more I played the worse the popping got plus I use a mic for playing and my friends say I am breaking up really bad with the NX. They had no problems hearing me with the internal versions. I just tried to get the sound card to mess up in Ghost Recon but was unsuccessful. Unfortunatly I do not have any new games, I don't play em much. Gonna uninstall Horizons and reinstall and see if that fixes anything then gonna plug in the internal Audigy 2 again as well. If all else fails I will reformat my HD and try from scratch. Perhaps there is something messing it up somewhere.

-Eric

[eedmond]

Sheesh I am begining to actually look like my avatar. I pulled the NX out it got worse and worse over the evening to the point it was as bad as the internal Audigy 2 and my friends couldn't hear me on the mic. So I put the Audigy 2 Internal back in and the mic problem went away. Still pops and crackles but I am guessing it HAS to be a game issue. None of my friends are having problems though but I will submit to their Tech support for help.

I wish I had a newer system intense game to test it out. Ghost Recon is kinda old and so is Morrowind and all my other games that I have that I can try.

Forgot to mention that I uninstalled Horizons and reinstalled. Went into MSConfig and disabled all startup items and launched the game and then uninstalled the NX and reinstalled the internal and tried it with and without startup items in MSConfig. No difference still cracks and pops.

-Eric