Crackling on Audigy SE...Official Explanation is Bo

Question

It appears this is a common problem with Creative's cards. I've read the "official" explanation of why it happens, and at this point I'd like to note that I'm not hopelessly retarded. This official explanation is about as bogus as it gets. It's like saying your car's brakes don't work because you're going slower than the speed limit.
As for my situation, I bought an Audigy SE to replace my motherboard's pitiful onboard sound (which had begun to malfunction). The comparison is night and day--the Audigy has much clearer sound...when it isn't deciding to randomly crackle.
It worked great for over a week. Within the last few days, it's decided to start crackling all the time though. At first I believed it to be faulty hardware, and I was planning on getting a replacement from Wal-Mart. After a bit of searching, I saw that it is a common problem. I read the official explanation and knew that something was definately wrong. I've come to believe it to be Creative's drivers for this card.
Conspicuous things I have noticed This crackling only happens in Windows using Creative's drivers.2) Nearly 00% of the time, the crackling only starts to happen when another application is loaded or closed.3) There are no drivers posted for this card on the site (at least where they should be) to try in place of the ones that come on the disc.
The first point is a big one. When Creative's drivers aren't being used to control the Audigy SE, the card works fine, always. I've run the development version of Ubuntu 6.06 with the 2.6.5-9 i386 kernel & the generic kernel module for this sound card's chip between /4 and /3 of the time during these days when the problem emerged. Never once has this happened when I'm running Linux.
The second point is interesting. When in Windows, the crackling will start when other processes are launched or terminated. If you start a movie or song and just sit there, there is never a problem. When the crackling is triggered, it is usually solvable by simply closing the media player program (I use Winamp and BSPlayer myself) and starting it again. The issue will be gone until triggered again as described above.
The third point is just odd. There is no product page for the Audigy SE, nor is there a downloads page for this elusi've Wal-Mart card. While this isn't necessarily important to my driver suspicions, it does hinder my ability to troubleshoot by using different drivers in Windows.
The Audigy is in my middle PCI slot and is assigned IRQ 8 with an I/O address range of 9800-98F. There are no other devices in my machine sharing these resources. I cannot move the card, as all other slots are occupied and positioned because the cards will not fit in other locations. For example, there is a capacitor that prevents any other card from using one of the slots, my VGA cooler blocks off the top slot, and my 3ware raid controller's connections block the bottom slot. The used slots are populated with the Audigy, a Silicon Image SATA controller, and a 3ware Escalade 7500-8.
I realize that this scenario is likely not true for all cases of crackling, but it does lead me to believe that the issue here is a bad driver...not a bad system configuration. It wouldn't be the first time that a sound driver has had to be reinstalled or upgraded for seemingly no reason. It's happened with my friend's Extigy many times and also with my last two motherboards' onboard audio solutions.
Message Edited by Tbird76 on <SPAN class=date_text>04-06-2006 <SPAN class=time_text>02:07 PM
Message Edited by Tbird76 on 04-06-2006 02:08 PM

Answer 1

Hi,
The answer to your dilemma is PCI Latency. The problem is that today's video cards jack up the latency settings so that they will provide better benchmarking results. When a PCI device such as a soundboard or AGP graphics card (yes, AGP, which also travels on the PCI bus - remember AGP is a port, not a bus) grabs the PCI bus to send data, the PCI Latency Timer starts counting down. When it gets down to zero, it releases the bus and lets other devices use it. If there are no devices waiting, it keeps using it. It is important to note that the timer is set in cycles (not seconds), so this can affect any speed machine although it seems to crop up most often with AGP cards + fast sound boards (Audigy and above). The PCI Latency Timer can be set anywhere from 0 to 255, although it is usually set in blocks of 8. Most of the time for a grossly overset PCI device, you will see 248. That setting is ridiculous. It means every time a device has it, it counts down 248 cycles until it offers it up again. If another device is set much lower (say at 32), that device only counts down 32 cycles before it goes back to the PCI bus hog. Needless to say, the device at 32 gets the bus 8 times less than the device at 248 (in layman's terms).
The Audigy 2 is set to 32. That is a reasonable setting. Many video cards are set much higher than that, some as I said up to 248. What ends up happening is that you will notice this problem more and more as your soundboard gets better and better. Ironic, isn't it's A SB Li've card can only process a limited number of concurrent sounds, but an Audigy 2 or X-Fi can process considerably more. Therefore, it needs the PCI bus more than older cards in order to provide more sounds. But if you don't change the PCI Latency settings of your videocard, then a much newer sound board will get the bus exactly the same amount as an older one, despite the fact that a newer one wants to do more. See the problem? That is also why many people who find solutions to mitigate this problem often advise turning off EAX. That greatly reduces the number of concurrent sounds handled by your soundboard (and removes all the benefit of buying a good board!).
Now here is the rub. Regardless of what you set your PCI Latency settings to in your BIOS, every PCI device will OVERRIDE them and set whatever the driver authors want. Annoying, isn't it's The best way to see this is to either download the 00% free utility called Double Dawg (ses link below), or the shareware app Powerstrip. Both will show PCI latency settings while XP is running, and both allow you to reset them on-the-fly.
Try it out, it fixed my problem. I have an Athlon .4, Audigy 2, and Asus Radeon 9600XT. As soon as I fire up BF942, Doom3, or Far Cry, I would start to get annoying pops and hisses, crackling, and interference. No more! I have set both my vidcard and Audigy 2 to 32, and I have no problems any longer. You may have to experiement with the settings a bit, I have heard that 80 for vidcard and 64 for soundboard work pretty well for other people. But you must change it if it is set at 248 because that means your vidcard is hogging the PCI bus.
For more info, you can find some excellent tips on this site : http://www.mark-knutson.com/t3/index.html
It's the site of the guy who wrote Double Dawg.
Rooster.