Hi Morey, I had a quick look around the web for examples of this problem, and it seems that it's not necessarily caused by problems with the sound hardware or driver - it can be caused by other drivers not working properly. You can check this by temporarily disabling certain devices in the device manager and seeing if the problem goes away. You can disable and then enable a device from the its context menu. It looks like the devices to check are the network adaptor, the modem, and tv tuner(if you have one). Note that you obviously shouldn't disable any core hardware that will stop your computer working completely. The following website was the source of some of this information. Note that there's no need to download their latency detector, since you're got a crackle detector already. http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Unfortunately the chipset drivers can't be tested this way, since it would stop the computer working. I'm afraid I've no knowledge of sound cards, I just use the realtek on-board sound, best wishes, David. original message: Hi David, I had sighted assistance for this one as the Acer site is tough. According to their web site, the Win/7 drivers are not avavailable for my machine (model M1610) I even downloaded the Real Tech drivers, from Real Tech, and installed them. The end product was that it made the crackling worse, so back to the drivers that Win/7 installed from Microsoft. II have only 1 alternative left....a new sound card. Is there a sound card that is any better than the other that you might recommend? Something from the Creative Labs people? Thanks, Morey Worthington To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: pc-audio-unsubscr...@pc-audio.org