Audio stutter problem in XPS 15 (L501X)

Hi All,

I have been using my XPS 15 for listening to music quite a lot. The audio quality is really nice through the headphone output with all the WaveMax stuff. I frequently notice that the music will stutter while playing, sometimes not for several minutes in between, but its annoying when it happens. It's really fast stutter, almost sounds like a high pitched buzz for a second.

I noticed this on my first XPS 15, which was replaced with this one for unrelated issues. So, I know it's not an isolated issue. It's not my player either, I use WinAmp but also noticed this in WMP as well as system notification sounds occasionally. It's not the audio driver either, because I have used 3 different ones from DELL. If I had to guess, I would suspect the power management to be causing it, maybe while throttling the CPU or something.

I looked into the windows event manager and under the system logs I kept seeing this warning which I thought to be strange: " The speed of processor 0 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 30 seconds since the last report." I'm not sure if its related at all to the issue, but I'm curious if any other L501X users see it in their logs.

Does anybody else experience the audio stuttering/buzzing every few minutes while listening to music?

Does anybody else have the strange system warning in their windows event log?

 

There is a thread about the same you can find it a few pages backward. You can probe to deactivate power perfomance in the waveMax Configuration. I have noticed now that if i set up on a windows gadget that checks the nvidia temps, the audio is crackling all the time, if close the gadget, sounds good, so I think the problem come from software that is checking the hardware all the time.

 

I have made sure to disable all the power management stuff in the audio control panel. I also don't have any unnecessary software on there since I did a clean install of Win7. I wonder if Dell would be of any help. After my last experience with them, I'd rather suffer this annoyance than to call their tech support.