Windows 10: micro-glitches and dropouts?

[ounwx]

It seems no matter which DAC, software, drivers, or output bitrate/frequency I use, I simply can't get flawless audio from my Windows 10 PC.

Don't get me wrong: my audio *generally* plays just fine, and there are no indications of serious issues. Instead, I have just enough annoying micro-glitches and 50-ms dropouts -- I'd say on average, once every 1-5 minutes while playing music -- that it drives me nuts.

Here's the worst part: it happens with roughly the same frequency whether I use onboard line out, onboard S/PDIF, or a USB DAC. Or whether I use foobar2000 or MusicBee. Or regardless of how I set the various knobs in those programs (DS vs. WASAPI, WASAPI exclusive vs. shared, thread priority, blah blah). Sample rate doesn't seem to matter, either.

At the end of the day, I'm coming to the conclusion that Windows 10 simply can't output audio to hardware flawlessly; there must be something in the kernel or underlying architecture that allows for small glitches when I/O or CPU usage spikes, or something like that. Am I crazy, or have others seen this? The only other hypothesis I can dream up is that it's something inherent to my motherboard (Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3, for reference). Even then, I'm not sure why the same symptom would affect both USB DACs and onboard audio.

Am I really expecting too much that my modern, AMD Ryzen-based PC should be capable of outputting uninterrupted audio in 2019 under normal conditions (a few browser tabs open and nothing else)? I upgraded to this system a couple years ago, around the same time Windows 10 was released, so it's difficult to pinpoint whether it's the OS or my hardware I should associate with this behavior. Either way, considering I'm running modern and fairly popular hardware, it's absurd. I have a 100+ GB FLAC collection I've spent years ripping and accruing, and anymore I feel like I'm going to have to break out an old CD deck if I want to do the material justice.

 

[katulu]

I've always hated Windows for a variety of reasons, just Win10 installed at work and it's instant frustration and trying to find workarounds for new "features" that piss one off to no end. Anyway, as far as my home audio, I'm lucky to have a Chord Dave/HMS (their driver bypasses the Windows 10 audio) and I can enjoy it, especially since they just ported Neutron MP (had to set higher latencies for it to work right, and it sounds great now). As I write, I realize my problem with Neutron was the latencies were set too low, and the audio would play fine for a minute then continuously drop/resume. Also, set your DAC playback device as default, and turn audio enhancements off (playback device - properties). Something to explore?

 

[bfreedma]

I have no problems with Windows 10 (or Windows 7) audio output on multiple systems running diverse hardware. Given the millions (billions?) of Windows users, if there was something inherently wrong with the OS, we would be reading about it here daily.

It's most likely something in your configuration, or something in software that's spiking CPU or disk utilization. Have you run perfmon to see if you can find any alignment with resource utilization and the issues you're experiencing?

 

[Slogra]

I remember cpu throttling could cause this issue. And i found this nice article with solutions:

https://tunecomp.net/fix-clicking-and-popping-sound-issue-in-windows-10/

 

[redrol]

It seems no matter which DAC, software, drivers, or output bitrate/frequency I use, I simply can't get flawless audio from my Windows 10 PC.

Don't get me wrong: my audio *generally* plays just fine, and there are no indications of serious issues. Instead, I have just enough annoying micro-glitches and 50-ms dropouts -- I'd say on average, once every 1-5 minutes while playing music -- that it drives me nuts.

Here's the worst part: it happens with roughly the same frequency whether I use onboard line out, onboard S/PDIF, or a USB DAC. Or whether I use foobar2000 or MusicBee. Or regardless of how I set the various knobs in those programs (DS vs. WASAPI, WASAPI exclusive vs. shared, thread priority, blah blah). Sample rate doesn't seem to matter, either.

At the end of the day, I'm coming to the conclusion that Windows 10 simply can't output audio to hardware flawlessly; there must be something in the kernel or underlying architecture that allows for small glitches when I/O or CPU usage spikes, or something like that. Am I crazy, or have others seen this? The only other hypothesis I can dream up is that it's something inherent to my motherboard (Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3, for reference). Even then, I'm not sure why the same symptom would affect both USB DACs and onboard audio.

Am I really expecting too much that my modern, AMD Ryzen-based PC should be capable of outputting uninterrupted audio in 2019 under normal conditions (a few browser tabs open and nothing else)? I upgraded to this system a couple years ago, around the same time Windows 10 was released, so it's difficult to pinpoint whether it's the OS or my hardware I should associate with this behavior. Either way, considering I'm running modern and fairly popular hardware, it's absurd. I have a 100+ GB FLAC collection I've spent years ripping and accruing, and anymore I feel like I'm going to have to break out an old CD deck if I want to do the material justice.

I own a PC repair business and specialize in audio PCs. You have an issue with DPCs, or on laymans terms, your motherboard has a device(s) that is causing the entire system to interrupt. The worst offenders typically are Wireless cards followed by graphics cards. But also many motherboards are simply badly designed with respect to onboard chips which have extra functionality.

You are likely going to want to get into your bios and play with powersaving / frequency scaling controls.

Suffice to say, my Windows 10 PC with 8700K can stream 200 FLAC files, while playing games AND encoding stuff without skipping a step.