I have been trying last night and all day to fix my sound from crackling and popping.
I have used a lot of tutorials online.
Changing bitrates, disabling exclusive mode, reg edit to disable power throttling, using headphones, etc.
Nothing. Works.
other things I have tried…
Reinstalling windows.
Rolling back drivers, trying new ones, using windows HD driver (Even though realtek reinstalls its self - even after disabling automatic driver installs.)
testing all bit rates.
Latency tests
canceling power throttling.
Disabling pagefiles.
I literally feel like I have tested everything possible and I get the same popping and crackling. Not just in WoW but with my system in general.
Can anyone give me advice on maybe something I haven’t tried. This is driving me absolutely crazy.
My sound channel settings is “Sound Output (Default)”, "Sound Channel (high 64), and "Sound Cache (Large 128MB)
Have you tried to check if anything is damaged on your ports? It’s possible there could be a bad ground in your case somewhere. The only real way to weed this out, without getting out oscilloscopes, is to use a USB headset that has it’s own sound card built into it, rather than using the computer’s sound card. You might be able to try something like a PS4 controller because I think they have their own generic sound cards in them for headsets and show up as such in the device manager. You’ll need to set your audio output to use the controller audio output, instead of your normal realtek.
EDIT: Just tested using a PS4 controller’s audio and it works. I disabled my realtek soundcard and am using the wireless controller output. So give this a shot if you have a controller around. (plug it in with a USB cable)
If it’s not that, something might be eating up your CPU. You might want to try running LatencyMon and seeing if anything abnormal is going on. If everything looks clear, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Potentially a dumb question, but are you playing a death knight or teamed with a DK when this happens? I read a lot of bug reports that there is a death knight bug that causes crackling and popping noise effects for the user and those around them. If not, disregard lol.
This is something we’re aware of, if you start noticing it more around DKs or while playing DKs. If it doesn’t seem consistent with that, does it help to try disabling the discord overlay? Open the Discord Application, go to Settings > Overlay and toggle off the “Enable in-game overlay.” If you commonly use the overlay toggle hotkey, make sure to change this to something you won’t use.
If it persists and its not the DK issue, let’s grab a screenshot of HWMonitor while running the game. Use an image sharing website like imgur and paste the URL between two ` (~ key) like so:
you dont have to come by if you dont want, im ALSO watching this thread as well
but can you guys confirm for me when you hear the popping sound the race and gender of the DK that is near by? or if you have a DK your race and gender
(also for CS, in the first 2 tickets posted in the thread all blizzard troubleshooting steps and additional ideas has been exhasted)
I am having the sound cracking issue as well, it happens when around DKs or Boomkins, usually in raid situations. Changing the sound channels to lower seems to help.
I have tried a Soundblaster Z internal sound card and a SoundblasterX G6 and they both display the same issue.
I have tried disabling SBX audio enhancements and this only helps a little bit.
> Overlay and toggle off the “Enable in-game overlay.” If you commonly use the overlay toggle hotkey, make sure to change this to something you won’t use.