e6500 crackling audio

My E6500 has a discrete NVDIA Quadro NVS graphics. So maybe that's part of the problem. It would be interesting to see if all the people with crackling problems like me use discrete graphics.

 

While I'm complaining, I should point that upgrading my E6500 to Vista Buisness causes several other problems. I couldn't get the WebCam software to work even after installing the updated driver. When try to remove my External USB Drive, the computer says it's OK to remove the drive but it's not - the drive is still running. In addition, the upgrade to Vista requires a security update that asks you to make a MS-DOS boot disc. However, Vista would not allow me to select the option to format the disc as a MS-DOS Boot disc. The Dell tech couldn't figure out what was wrong either and just suggested I reinstall Vista.

All in all, the E6500 is a very nice looking, powerful laptop but I've never had so many problems. It'd be nice if there was an easy fix but it's not looking that way. It's too bad, because I've been pretty happy with my previous Latitudes and Inspirons - they all worked pretty well right out of the box and never any repairs.

 

I had the same problem with removing external drives with Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers version 8.6. After performing "Safe remove hardware" on a E-SATA drive it was be re-detected immediately. If I tried unplug the drive I got nasty delayed-write errors. I also had problems with the DVD drive locking up with 8.6. It seems that this version is not fully compatible with Dell Latitude E6400/E6500. 8.5 worked better, but now I use the Dell customized 8.2.2 version and it seems to work fine.

Just because the audio crackling problem appears when installing Intel Matrix Storage Manager doesn't have to mean they are the drivers that cause the problem. It could be that the storage drivers just makes another problem visible, e.g. by claiming a lot of bandwidth on the system bus making other drivers that are poorly written to not work correctly. I am not saying that Intel Matrix is not the problem, just that there is not enough information to verify this.

Örjan

 

I just ran the DPC Latancy checker on my E6400.

Without any music playing I get green bars only. Latency varies between 200 microsecs and 800 microsecs.

Playing an MP3 file in Media Player increases the average latency slightly but it is still in the green. No audio problems.

While still playing an MP3 file in Media, I started the Visual effect "Alchemy". Now the latency increased drastically to approximately 2000 microsecs, at least for some of the "Alchemy" effects (not all). Almost all the latency values were very close to 2000. Still no audio problems.

I then tried some other stuff: Downloading a large ISO over the wireless network connection, copying a large file on the hard drive etc. Still not audio problems. I also ran some of the built-in 3D screen savers in Windows XP. I got a few latency spikes of 8000 microsecs but I couldn't notice any audio problems.

As a last thing I played a DVD movie in the DVD player. When I had inserted the disc the entire Windows GUI just froze for a few seconds. But audio continued to play fine with any problems! And when playing the movie the audio from the MP3 file was correctly mixed together with the audio from the movie without any problems. Latency bars were now all in green.

So all in all I haven't noticed any audio problems on my E6400.

The only problem I have with audio is that the IDT control panel is missing a lot of settings I would expect to be there like digital audio settings, equalizer etc.

Örjan

 

Dell Support released an updated BIOS version A09 (11/23/2008). Upgrading from A06 to A09 seems to have solved my latency and audio crackling on my E6500 running Windows XP!!!

Unfortunately, my E6500 running Windows Vista Business still has latency & audio crackling issues with BIOS A09. It's too bad, because I liked many features in Vista. However, I'm probably better off sticking with XP for a few more years. There just seems to be too many bugs still with Vista - at least in my hands.


Maybe I'm missing some driver or something, but I think I'm going to stick with XP until I get my next laptop. It's too bad, because I like many of the features in Vista, but

 

I also went back to the 8.2.2 version of Intel Matrix Storage Manager. That's the one that Dell still recommends on their website for E6500. As I posted above, it seems to work fine on my E6500 running XP with BIOS A09. Also, I agree the problem might not be the Storage Manager itself but could be that it amplifies some other problem.

 

I have A09 BIOS and XP without audio problems so maybe the A09 BIOS is what solved the problem. I don't remember that I had any audio problems before I updated from the A06 BIOS my machine was shipped with but I haven't playing a lot of music on it before so I cannot say for sure.

Örjan

 

Yes, it seems that you don't have the audio problems. Latencies (on the DPC Latency checker) temporarily increase when starting programs, starting audio/video files, or changing the brightness of the LED display, but this isn't a problem. Audio crackling occurs when latencies increase periodically from ~ 500 us to > 8 msec every 4secs.

Also, the audio crackling/stuttering can be pretty subtle - at least initially. Most people might not notice it if you're not listening for it. However, once you notice it, it quickly gets to be very annoying - especially to an audiophile. Unfortunately, I don't think I can post a .wav file here for you to listen to. The skipping/stuttering issue is more obvious.

This is probably a stupid question, but does the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M graphics card also control audio output? I thought it was just for controlling video graphics.

 

Beside the Intel matrix and (some) WLAN driver causing audio problems,
there seems to be another cause:

My system (E6500/T9600/Vista64/Intel5300) basicly works fine, except when I do wakeup the system from standby, DPC Latency shows peaks >100ms for up to 3-4 minutes. During this time I do not only get serious audio problems and the mouse jumps when moved. It seems that these delays to certain input drivers can cause the keyboard/mouse drivers become completly messed up requiring a hard reset of the system. While this happens rarely, I am basicly forced waiting some minutes after turning on the system in order to safely start using the mouse and more...

I did some tests by disabling various hardware drivers and it turned out to be the Ricoh chip used for PCMCIA (and Firewire?) causing the latency problems after standby. After some browsing, it seems also other notebook makers using the Ricoh chip are affected since the release of Vista. I wonder why Dell did use this chip without fixing the known problems first.

Since I disabled PCMCIA in the device manager everything seems fine... but what do I do with my various PCMCIA cards now?

And as last note regarding Dells software support: What about the cryptic update filenames? No tool to automaticly downloading/installing the latest bios/drivers like many other manufacturers offer since years? Considering the time it takes to do this manually, for a high priced business notebook this is unacceptable.

 

The newest downloads now have more helpful filenames such as "DELL_TOUCHPAD----POINTING-ST_A08_R202446.exe" instead of "R202446.exe".

As for automatic updates, I would automatic notification that updates are available but not automatic installation. Dell's main customers probably like their IT people to decide what updates to apply, and when to do it. We know that computer behaviour (and problem occurrence) can vary significantly depend on BIOS, driver and software versions.

John