Crackling audio (not sure if this is the "same" problem)

Question

I have been experiencing crackling audio under certain circumstances with my Soundblaster X-Fi XtremeMusic. I am no audio expert, but it seems to me that the problem occurs when multiple?"types" of audio are played at the same time. For example, in a game, when voices are played over pre-existing background music, the audio on the voices will get crackly and staticky. This is recreatable in GTA4; that game uses a third-party interface (Microsoft Li've) to track game progress and post updates inside of the game. The game's internal audio is fine, but any sounds "inserted" into the game by Microsoft Li've will be all crackly because they seem to be "competing" with the existing sound effects from the game. It gets really annoying at times.
The "trigger" for this issue?was when I upgraded to a newer NVidia driver for my 7950GX2 graphics card. My sound was fine for years until I updated the driver to 72.xx and newer. However, I am not just talking about the newest driver. This has been happening since June and continues to happen with every NVidia release since then. This happens with every driver beyond 72.xx and now I am using 80.xx. Reverting drivers back to pre June 2008 is most definitely not an option, because I play current games and I update NVidia drivers on a weekly basis as new ones are released.
When the new X-Fi driver came out, I thought finally this problem would be resolved. However, the new driver did nothing to resolve the problem at all. I have tried all versions of the X-Fi driver from 2004 to the present. Nothing fixes the problem.
Suggestions are welcome... :smileyindifferent:

Answer 1

FRe: Crackling audio (not sure if this is the "same" problem)? Hi, I used to post in these forums a couple of years ago, after an Audigy 4 literally corrupted my hard disk and nearly killed my motherboard's SATA controller.
Anyway, after a lot of debate etc. it turned out that post-Audigy Sound Blasters, including X-Fis, are extremely sensiti've to PCI timing issues and have horrible bus mastering themselves, something which was NEVER quite fixed and keeps popping up time and again. In the best of cases you will get static, in the worse cases you will get BSODs, corrupted data, or even actual damage to the hardware. Not much you can do, really, than putting up with it, like many other users before you did.
P.S.: I'm sure that shortly after this post, a certain user will chime in and start raving about how most chipsets and RAM modules are garbage, and how he uses a super-duper "golden pick" reliable system with a chipset that does everything "nice and slow" and super-reliably and ofc works wonders with ANY "problematic" CL card to date,? and how it's not really CL's fault but that of the garbage mobos, chipsets, ram etc.