Hi all,
I’m new here but have been lurking awhile. I added a Delta Audiophile to my setup and immediately got loads of pops and clicks. After much frustration, setting of the PC to Standard, separate IRQ’s for graphics and audio cards (all to no avail), I stumbled across a site that pointed me in the direction of PCI Latency.
(http://www.mark-knutson.com/t3/pci_latency.html)
I downloaded the tool, changed the PCI Latency setting for my graphics card from 248 to 80 and the AGP bus down to 80 and hey presto no more pops and clicks!
There is another tool which is better in that the settings are remembered in reboot.
(http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951)
Before trying anything else I would recommend trying these tools as it solved the problems I was having.
Thanks all … this is a great forum. I’m looking forward to spending quality time here.
Cheers,
Steve
There was a MAJOR audio glitching problem years ago when using some video cards. To get better video stats the video driver would lock the PCI bus for up to 50ms at a time in bursts when scrolling. The symptom was that audio would glitch and crackle with a zipper sound when scrolling inside any app such as a browser that was displaying a doc that was larger than the display area. It was horrendous. The manufacturers got great specs, at the expense of the rest of the system. The fix was a regkey to turn off PCI bus locking (It’s video card and manufacturer specific.). They also got caught so they don’t do it anymore…hmmmm… 
Those tools wouldn’t prevent the problem of old, but if using them fixes the glitching I bet something similar is happening. Keep in mind that anything that locks the PCI bus too long can cause audible clitching - it might not always be video, but that sure is a great place to start looking.
Some Creative sound cards lock the PCI bus up to 50ms themselves when creating hardware buffers. That can cause glitches in audio, and it’s the sound card doing to itself. That could happen when playing multiple sounds from different sources and a new sound starts up from another source. As long as the buffers are all created before playback starts this won’t be audible. That’s also older Creative Audigy I and Live cards. I don’t know if the newer Audigy II cards have that problem, but my guess is…they might. Anyway, that’s a one shot deal in a rare scenario – it might only happen when using DirectSound output as well.
I also seem to get more pops and clicks with a Delta 44 and n-track v4 than I did with n-track v3 (I could never record at 24-bit 96KHz even with v3). I have however changed my PCI Latency in the bios from 64 to 128 and set buffers to “medium buffering” and all is Ok again at 24-bit 48KHz. I’m using the latest Delta 44 WDM drivers (.51).
I am surprised that reducing latency settings reduces pops and clicks, I would expect to have to increase latency values for everything rather than the sound card. Am I barking up the wrong tree?
Ta
John
Hi John,
What I did was reduce the latency setting on my video card which was set to a huge value of 248 thereby hogging lots of cycles, not giving my sound card a chance. Also, I reduced the latency on the AGP card as again it was hogging cycles. This worked a treat.
Glad you’ve removed your pops & clicks … now to actually recording some music!
Steve