@Sanctuary For me, it does happen on Windows 7, but only when using firefox in combination with youtube. I did see some improvement with the newest firefox. When you now close firefox, it actually resets the sounds. It seems in the recent builds of firefox, this situation has improved. I do...

@mindbomb Basically this issue is now mostly solved for me. With Firefox Quantum Edition (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox-quantum/) and the skia settings, the issue is finally gone. I only had this issue with old Firefox (Gecko engine) + Video DownloadHelper last...

@justtesting You missed a newer post of me about this issue. The issue was finally solved for me by protecting buggy software with emet and/or configuring the backend of the software. Winamp should only be used with classicpro skins and firefox should be used with the skia backend. It seems...

Hmm, the bug was back last week, but now it seems really seldom. I am now trying another solution. It seems firefox is corrupting the memory. The HPET just seems to mitigate the issue. It looks like the memory gets filled too much and i get a createTexture error from direct2d 1.1 backend. As...

@Stenk I burned a AKG 550 on a xonar essence in some months. I think it is correlated to the high sensitivity (114 dB) and the low impedance. If you want to test the heating effect, you can plugin an earphone at that setting (<64 ohm). It will quickly heat up. Since I have changed the setting...

Dear @Stenk,   you shouldn't use a akg k550 with a xonar essence stx. It doesn't have the setting 'IEM or 16-32 ohm headsets' and it seems the xonar xense doesn't support this setting neither according to the manual. These are only supported on the xonar essence stx ii.   Practically you...

I think I found the solution to this issue and it is quite simple.   Following observations: 1) this issue happens more when Link State Power Management is set on 2) this issue happens more with Asus motherboard and Asus bioses come more with support for HPET 3) this issue happens when CPU...

I think the issue with firefox is due to this application not using by default the Windows channel api. You can fix this by setting media.useAudioChannelAPI to true in about:config. This will lessen the reoccurrence of the loud noise. My guess is that when you use the audio channel api, you...

I also had this issue in the past. This issue always seemed to start when my cpu is idling and I start some audio or video clip, so I think the issue is partially power supply-related.   The following steps solved the issue: 1) make sure that the soundcard power supply is correctly connected...