crackles due to PCI bus noise? - Page 2

What motherboard and CPU do you have?

As I understand you didn't have the problem before you put x-meridian in? Try taking one of the cards out.

Also, is the sound sent to both cards at the same time? Or do you disable one depending on the application?

Are you overclocking? Can you try increasing the voltage of your motherboard's northbridge chip? It seemed to solve the problem for somebody on Creative's forum.

nForce4 chipset had general issues with PCI latency - this might affect any device connected to PCI, but with sound cards it becomes quite apparent. I found good info on that on RME website
BIOS and chipset drivers update for motherboard would be your first thing to try.
Somebody mentioned PCI latency - unless you can find the setting for this in BIOS there is generic PCI latency tool that you could give a try.

I am getting the crackles too since I installed ASIO4ALL, it it happens once in a awhile and I have to stop the track or advance it for it to stop. I have a Yamaha WaveForce 192XG soundcard so I doubt its your soundcard thats causing it. This never happens when I use the DS drivers. What I noticed since installing ASIO4ALL is that my volume is very loud and I have to slide the Volume slider on the KMixer down to the 1st notch or I will go deaf ...LoL and the wave slider has no control now too which is suppose to be normal and that the ASIO driver is enabled.

Update:

I have installed, tested and listened to ASIO4ALL, KS Kernal Streaming and DS Direct Sound in Foobar2000 and I noticed that the crackle and pops were always there in the source recording, it just wasn't as evident when your are playing it through DS.

Apparently if you have a VIA chipset based motherboard you will get this problem due to a latency problem that is a known issue.
Just do asearch on Google and this problem will come up numerous time especially for people with Creative Audigy soundcards.

its not just nforce4 boards. Creative has had this problem since the live cards. They never have followed the pci spec and have never given a **** about fixing them. They always blame the mother board. Well first it was VIA chipsets and now nforce chipsets.

Ok, finally settle on using KS Kernal Stream, better sounds than ASIO, no crackling or pops and uses less resources than ASIO or even Direct Sound.

I need to add the resampler to the DSP and set to 44100hz inorder to play my 96000hz FLAC files though. My card is only 44100hz.

Does anyone know if this is a driver issue or due to hardware? It's strange that many people are affected, and also equally strange that many people aren't.

ASIO4ALL and Aardvark Direct-Pro 24/96 Sound Card

I've finally gotten my Aardvark Direct Pro 24/96 to work full-out with Winamp using a different Asio4All plug-in than the one at the Winamp plug-in site.

I found all the instructions at AQVOX, a German site (in both English and German)

The version of the Asio4All Winamp plug-in preferred by this author is from a Japanese language site http://otachan.com (look for out_asio(exe).dll (exe version) Ver. 0.70 or newer), and though the above instructions at AQVOX showed v63, there was a v70 there now.

This one worked for me where the other one did not (the Aardvark drivers are old and flaky and they haven't made any newer ones), and it includes a very nice resampler allowing me to upsample to 96kHz to match what my Direct Pro would rather be seeing. It is definitely more completely implemented than the version from Winamp's plug-in site.

One thing slightly problematic is that you have to download 7zip to unzip this file - the author favors that zip program and only offers the file zipped using it. But it was easy to download and effortless to un7zip the .dll file into my Winamp plug-ins folder.

You also will need the full-blown Asio4All stand-alone, which is up to V7 now, if you have USB or other devices accessible via WDM that you wish to hook up via ASIO. All the instructions are at the abovementioned site.

Finally, my Direct Pro and its excellent headphone amplifier are able to give me all that it is capable of delivering!!! I hope you have good luck with these. The Japanese author's Asio4All Winamp plug-in is a very excellent piece of work.

Terry

(Of course, I hope you've all read EnOYiN's great tutorial on using Asio4All as well!)

I had crackling in my X-Fi and I simply reinstalled/reset the drivers. Also it's not uncommon for them to have problems when they aren't in the bottom PCI slot. If it has a power connector on the card try plugging that in as well.

Try one thing at a time though, so at least you can figure out what was the problem

Hah! There is the best piece of sage wisdom I've seen mentioned on this entire site!

Terry

I am looking in to that driver right now. Mainly to try and see what things he did differently.