Creative Omni 5.1. Obnoxious buffer underruns. What gives?

[windowlicker]

So I've got myself this Creative Sound Blaster Omni 5.1 Surround, and I am constantly wrestling with clipping and crackling. I tried it on two laptops. On one, I am using iTunes; on the other, foobar and spotify. Both are Windows 7 x64, 16Gb RAM, Core i7 CPU - plenty of juice.
 
I googled the subject and figured that I probably have buffer underrun problem. Indeed, LatencyMon says that my systems suck and underruns are imminent. (BTW LatencyMon itself makes clipping much worse. Looks like it is hogging the very resources it is trying to measure.)
 
Now, question is... What's up with the underruns? Why are my systems struggling? OK, on one of them I have a bunch of USB devices, including HDDs. I moved Omni to a separate port; no dice. However on my other laptop I have absolutely nothing on USB (except for Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse receiver)! What the hell? How do people even make USB DACs work if this underrun thing is such a plague?
 
I looked at LatencyMon's detailed analysis but nothing stands out. Hard page faults don't look terrible, mostly generated my msmpeng.exe (Windows anti-malware tool). Most active driver is ndis.sys that is unavoidable anyway (everyone has it I'm guessing).
 
Checked Power Options, throttling is off (minimum processor state is set to 100%). CPU usage is pretty low anyway; Firefox is being a pain as always, but it only eats one core.
 
What else am I missing? I am close to smashing that Omni with Thor's hammer and pouring molten lava into my USB ports.

 

[windowlicker]

Bump. Any ideas? This is driving me nuts, I am holding off on purchasing an amp+DAC because I fear that the DAC will be unusable...
 
Not that it is a surprise, but onboard sound card does not behave like that. (It's not USB after all.) The SQ is toilet though ;(

 

[homebrewdr]

  Bump. Any ideas? This is driving me nuts, I am holding off on purchasing an amp+DAC because I fear that the DAC will be unusable...
 
Not that it is a surprise, but onboard sound card does not behave like that. (It's not USB after all.) The SQ is toilet though ;(

Download the latest driver updates, no matter how old they seem to be. I've read that fixes the problem. 

 

[windowlicker]

Tried that, didn't help. Ended up returning the Omni. The amp/DAC I am currently using (Practical Devices XM6) does not have this issue.

 

[homebrewdr]

  Tried that, didn't help. Ended up returning the Omni. The amp/DAC I am currently using (Practical Devices XM6) does not have this issue.

Oh crap. I was between the Fiio E10K and Omni, but ordered the Omni earlier today. Hope that doesn't happen to me! The XM6 looks sweet.

 

[windowlicker]

  Oh crap. I was between the Fiio E10K and Omni, but ordered the Omni earlier today. Hope that doesn't happen to me! The XM6 looks sweet.

I hope you have good return policy on your side I bought from Amazon, that's always zero hassle.
 
XM6 is indeed very cool but way too portable. The box is tiny and hard to operate. Also, I think I paid a premium for the feature I didn't need (i.e. being portable).

 

[homebrewdr]

 
I hope you have good return policy on your side I bought from Amazon, that's always zero hassle.
 
XM6 is indeed very cool but way too portable. The box is tiny and hard to operate. Also, I think I paid a premium for the feature I didn't need (i.e. being portable).

Bought mine from Amazon too. I'm hoping its fine because I just got a new gaming laptop this week. The Omni apparently is not really a dac amp, its a soundcard with a dac-feature (acts like a dac but isnt) and an amp, so it would use the USB power and process through the CPU. Therefore if any of your components were lacking power, even a bios setting, it could cause an issue. Did you see what kind of load your CPU was running when it crackled? I'm interested in the resources it might take up.
 
Also, do you see a marked improvement with the dac part of your XM6? I'd like to educate myself about dacs, cause I'm a skeptic, bit of a pc enthusiast, and not sure if cheaper dacs are an improvement over most modern day mobo dacs.