Popping Just Showed Up on X-FI; Ideas?

T

That's_Corporate

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 30, 2006
Messages
1,738
Q6600
4 GB OCZ Reaper HPC
4870X2
X-Fi Platinum
300GB Velociraptor

Well those are my specs. The crackling/popping just showed up a few weeks ago, which is funny cause I don't remember making any hardware changes... Latest thing was probably some new catalyst drivers.

Anyone have any ideas? I find it strange that it wasn't there in the beginning...

Thanks in advance.
 
Describe the noise and how/when you notice it.
Are the noises still present when heard through headphones?
 
This is going to sound really weird and maybe a wee bit far fetched, but one day I was using foobar2000 and I put the fooAvA theme on foobar, and the sound went to shit.
 
Most likely coincidence. The original X-Fi cards that had popping or crackling problems (severely) were attributed to an electrical fault with I believe bad capacitors. Since yours seems to have gone bad over time, I would attribute it to a low level fault like this.

Of course if you have changed drivers lately, that might be an issue. On my system with an Xtremegamer and the recent beta drivers I get crackling in any Directsound 3D or EAX game. Switching back to official drivers (the ones ending in 15) cures it. I haven't tried the newer drivers after they went official.
 
I sometimes get a strange crackling sound on my X-Fi when my system is under medium CPU load. For some reason, Firefox + Flash tend to be the primary cause (youtube), though I can't figure out how Firefox and Flash can use so much CPU. If I'm not multitasking, it doesn't seem to happen. A reboot fixes it.

I'm running the Titanium Champion, which doesn't use the normal X-Fi driver.
 
I get rid of them using this technique (follow exactly):
power off pc
unplug pc and leave unplugged!
power on pc. machine will try to come on then die (power supply capacitors discharge fully)
power off pc
plug pc back in
power on pc. boot. cracklies should be gone.

In my case I think they are due to static electricity somehow and the above method always works to fix it.
 
Well now this is strange.
I went in and played with the crystalizer settings, turned it off, and now the crackling is gone...
 
Crystallizer compresses sound range and applies equalization arbitrarily. You could have been hearing clipping coming from sounds that are too loud or past a cutoff for the Crystallizer.
 
lawless2142 said:
Crystallizer compresses sound range and applies equalization arbitrarily. You could have been hearing clipping coming from sounds that are too loud or past a cutoff for the Crystallizer.
Click to expand...

Very good point!
When I am using Digital out on my Auzentech Prelude, some of my louder music clips.
I thought I had a driver peculiarity or the like.
To get round it, I reduce the Wave volume and increase the volume on my hifi.
This puts the volume levels more in line with my satellite box anyway so its a welcome change.
 
Can you reduce the wave volume in vista as well? It seems all volume controls in vista, affect the os ones too.
 
My XtremeGamer has recenty begun a random popping/snapping noise when clicking a link in IE (Windows XP), really no other issues than that. A driver reinstall seems to have corrected it for the time being, but I'm opting for a Titanium Pro for the PCI-e and be done with PCI latency/clock issues, hopefully for good.
 
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