e6500 crackling audio

Hi, my name is Philip and I suffer from crackling audio.

I see this is an E6500 thread but it seems to be the general crackling audio "support group" thread as well. I just wanted to chime in with my experience.

I have had a D630 for about a year now and it has the crackling audio problem (in itunes, wmp, cd, mp3, etc). It has the T7250 proc, Nvidia card, b/g wifi, bluetooth, WD 250GB 5400rpm, and a dvd burner and is running WinXP SP3. I noticed this problem as soon as i got the laptop and did multiple OS reinstalls which did not get rid of the problem. I even called dell tech support about it last April to try to resolve the issue.

After guiding me through diagnostics over the phone (trying to use a 10 second audio tone in the dell diagnostic before windows boot, which obviously isn't going to cut it) they tell me it isn't a hardware problem and must be a software problem. After video card driver updates and rollbacks my computer starts locking up. Then we attempt a system restore which fails and I end up reinstalling windows.

Then I went through processor/motherboard/heating pipe replacements and stuff overheating in between until they finally ended up sending me a brand new laptop. This came preloaded with Vista and before changing to XP I checked and it had the crackling even in Vista. At this point I was resigned to it and gave up trying to fix the problem. Crackling was once a minute which is bearable compared to some nasty every 5-10 second crackling I had seen during my ~15 reconfigurations/reinstallations. I was hoping the new latitude E-series, news of which had been leaked at that point, would resolve the problem and I could just upgrade when it came out. I did have the last tech that came listen to the problem and pointed the dell support people to a notebookreview forum that was discussing the problem.

Now it's January and I finally bought a Latitude E4300 from the Dell Outlet and hoping for the end of my crackling audio (more on that later).

So I see this thread now which gets my hopes down with people on E6400 and E6500 suffering the problem. I downloaded the DPC latency program and checked my D630 and i get latency of ~400us with a spike to ~23000us every 65 seconds like clockwork which correspond directly to the crackling audio dropouts (sometimes more dropouts in between but always on 65s mark).

Now for my E4300 so far no crackling audio! This is on the stock dell configuration with Vista Business 32bit and SP9300 proc, bluetooth, intel wifi 5300, webcam, no wwan antenna installed, dvd burner, integrated video, backlit keyboard, 160GB fujitsu 5400rpm drive in AHCI mode. This is amazing cause I listen to music all the time and have klipsch 2.1 speakers hooked up to my notebook when it is docked (full disclosure: i'm a minor audio snob).

On my E4300 the latency ranges from 400-1200us with rare spikes to 2000us or 4000us but I don't hear any audio dropouts. I tested with a music CD in wmp and also plugged in my backup drive and played some MP3s off of that also in WMP. But no audio dropouts. I am going to do a clean install on my new laptop but am waiting on a 320GB scorpio black HDD to come from newegg. I will stick with Vista this time (moment of silence for XP Pro) and I'm hoping that I will stay crackle free after my fresh install.

Sorry if this post got too long but just wanted to share with the group. I'll be posting my thoughts on the E4300 in that thread once I have it up and running with a a clean install but so far I like it a lot.

 

Several of us running the latest Intel Matrix Storage Driver are seeing very high latencies but have no audio crackling, so the linkage between high latency (as measured by the DPC latency checker) and crackles on audio playback isn't as well defined as previously thought. Perhaps the low latency is more critical for audio recording.

John

 

I'm running W7 since yesterday and can finally say, that this issue (almost) isn't one for me anymore. I do get a low pop from time to time, but it's almost not notable. I even have the IDT audio driver and Dell Wireless driver installed (Dell 1510).
Right now I am very! happy with this. Still have some problems installing drivers for 'SM Bus Controller' and 'USB Smart Card Reader' in device manager. Perhaps this could mean the problem is somehow related to one of these drivers...

 

Well i just quote from the m4400 thread

 

Same here. Currently running W7 with all of the drivers that it detected automatically (Haven't got SM Bus running, but I did install the BT drivers). No audio breakups, but there is the occasional pop. I never had any problems in XP, so these problems are new to me.

 

I solved my crackling problem by sending both 2 Dells back (one a year ago, one a month ago) and buying a Thinkpad T60 with Windows XP (one year ago) and a Macbook Pro one month ago. How can anyone possibly sell a laptop with crackling audio? And then...after a year of people complaining about it? Stupid.

 

thinkpad and ideapad have crackling ?

there are other brand with no crackling?



thanks

 

OMG!

I think I got something here! In the past days sometimes the crackling did not stop after wakeup from standby after a couple of minutes, as it used to do on my system. Even after going back to standby and retrying. I had gigantic peaks in latency and audio crackling.
Your mention of the Card Reader led me to the idea that maybe the device is checking periodically for an inserted card... so I popped one in...

Peaks gone.
Crackling gone.

Please check that on your systems.

 

Disabled the USB Smartcard reader and my latency still averages around 10000us and high in the red The search continues......

 

I tried disabling before. Did not work. Try inserting a card. There's no way that this is it but we should exercise a methodically correct exclusion.