Cannot stand the crackling

Folks, as you know I am always a staunch proponent of new Microsoft technologies, all the way back to Windows 3.1, but I have never had an issue with a near production OS from them as bad as this. I have a four core with 16GB and cannot get Zune to play w/o popping and making me crazy. I know it's interrupt based but there's no way I see to fix it since it's all ACPI virtualized now. I have a Gigabyte P45T-ES3G with a Q6600 o/c to 3.2 with a 400MHz FSB that's stable on Prime95 for days on end. I've installed the latest Realtek driver for the onboard ALC892. The last time this happened I had to reduce addressable memory below 4GB on an ABIT BP6 to get an Ensoniq AudioPCI card to play without crackling. I've tried going cold stock on that BIOS settings and no go. Anyone have a clue or is it some BS DRM stuff again?

Only in Zune and all others are well?

Could very well be another driver causing it if it's system-wide: DPC Latency Checker

Notorious culprits include, in this order: WLAN drivers, LAN drivers, security drivers

That program is useful and fairly self-explanatory after reading the page about it. Perhaps it can help.

And of course, 3rd party security should be uninstalled to test, if already present. If all else fails, definitely see how it is with the overclock removed.

If further troubles, I can look over msinfo32 if ya want.


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A little further info: Just another thought - Long ago I helped someone with this and relaxing the memory timings was the fix. It wasn't so much the overclock in this case, but it was the overclocked timings specifically. So once the memory was set to the SPD factory values for timings, things cleared up.

Audio dropouts are quite difficult because there are so many potential causes. But if enough effort is put in, usually it can be resolved one way or another.

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If wireless card is present and Atheros based (most are from Belkin, Cisco, D-Link, Linksys, Gigabyte and many others), here are all the latest drivers that are good:

ATHEROS drivers for Microsoft Windows (Atheros?????)

This is what Msoft has for this Zune crackling sound problem.

Audio sounds crackly or stutters when you use the Zune software

Seems like this is usually a driver problem when I see it, last time was creative drivers and Windows 7.