# Strange issue: All audio having a crackling sound despite upgrading to SSD



## premjj (May 29, 2020)

Hi

My Laptop was out of action for a while because the HDD had crashed. I replaced it with an Samsung EVO SSD recently and there was an immediate improvement in the laptop's performance. Loading time for all software have reduced drastically. Windows loads and shuts down in under 10 seconds.

So far so good.

But recently I suddenly started noticing a crackling sound with all the audio applications. Even streaming a video on YouTube has the same issue. I've tried tweaking the buffer settings on my sound card (Focusrite) but that hasn't helped.

Next I was trying to play back a Cubase project with just two audio files and the CPU spikes are just insane. I've tried disabling all plugins but the spikes continue. It is leading to audio dropouts and recording even a single track is getting interrupted every now and then.

My question here is that I never experienced these with my earlier HDD which was not an SSD. Can someone please throw light on what I might be missing here. My workflow is getting severely affected.

I've tried using LatencyMon and troubleshooting the drivers (from what I gathered on the internet) but none of that has helped so far.

Thanks

Edit: Am on Windows 7


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## ynwtf (Jun 4, 2020)

I just wanted to track and post up in this thread as I'm having similar issues, but possibly different circumstances.

I built a PC a few months back using a Samsung SSD and I've slowly been moving my software and hardware over to this system. Just recently I connected my mixing board to the PC and all seemed fine until I set my board's sample rate to 48. At this point I noticed a seemingly random pulse of static and pops no matter my audio source. Similar to you, it occurs while recording, playback, streaming content from YouTube, etc. Going back to 44.1 seems to tame it.

So far, I've assumed it was my mixer as I've not had issues until changing my board's sample rate. I contacted Presonus tech support and the guy has asked that I remove and then uninstall all my gear, plus a few techie system thing-a-mah-does. I've not had a chance to go through all that yet, but likely will this weekend.

I never considered it to be a drive issue though, so I'm curious what you find. Considering this is a fresh system, drives and all, it is interesting to read someone else experiencing something similar. Thanks for a new lead on this.

Please do keep this updated? I'd love to learn what you discover. If you're at all interested, I'll let you know what I experience once I've gone through these support steps and what those steps are, should they help me.


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## labornvain (Jun 4, 2020)

So how much time elapsed after you installed the SSD before you started having audio issues?

It sounds like from your post that everything was working at first, then something happened. Is this true?

Also, you say you ran LatencyMon but you didn't say what it said. Did it give you a green light, or do they identify problems?

It sounds like you've already updated your drivers. Did this include the chipset drivers? Video drivers?

Also, while everyone will tell you to install the latest drivers, and that's usually a good idea, sometimes new driver releases will actually break your system. So you might try installing legacy drivers on some things to rule out this possibility.

In a similar vein, as I'm sure you probably know, some Windows updates can break things. If it comes down to it you might try rolling back some of those.


But the first thing I always check for us to see if there's some egregious process running somewhere. He probably have gone in and disabled unnecessary processes, but just in case, check that.

If it were a process though, Latencymon probably would have caught it. Did you run audio while agency monitor was running? This is necessary.


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## premjj (Jun 7, 2020)

ynwtf said:


> I just wanted to track and post up in this thread as I'm having similar issues, but possibly different circumstances.
> 
> I built a PC a few months back using a Samsung SSD and I've slowly been moving my software and hardware over to this system. Just recently I connected my mixing board to the PC and all seemed fine until I set my board's sample rate to 48. At this point I noticed a seemingly random pulse of static and pops no matter my audio source. Similar to you, it occurs while recording, playback, streaming content from YouTube, etc. Going back to 44.1 seems to tame it.
> 
> ...



I haven't myself been able to spend enough time with the troubleshooting because of one of my external HDD acting up. I use it for backup so I need to figure out how to retrieve some data from it. 

I'll keep updating this thread when and how I find a solution to my original problem. For now switching to an older driver from nVidia seems to have minimised the popping, though I haven't tested it extensively on all my audio apps yet.


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## premjj (Jun 7, 2020)

labornvain said:


> If it were a process though, Latencymon probably would have caught it. Did you run audio while agency monitor was running? This is necessary.



I've tried that a lot and the usual culprits are nVidia and Microsoft drivers. But I haven't been able to troubleshoot them in detail yet. 

I do keep updating drivers as and when updates are released (both windows and nVidia and Focusrite) so am not sure if one of them is causing the problem. It will take me a while to isolate each one and then test it. 

I do recall using an updated driver for my audio interface when I installed the SSD. The new driver seems to be more stable and is not causing the frequent BSD errors which were being caused by the last version (and which lead to my earlier HDD getting corrupted in the first place) so I have had no reason to doubt those. I would not want to fiddle with those because losing a HDD is a much bigger issue than dealing with pops and glitches in audio.


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## ynwtf (Jun 8, 2020)

Well for me, Presonus gave up, pointing to my i9 processor. The guy said to be on the lookout for a new driver update, if or whenever that happens, and to check the release notes to see if they address my specific issue at that time, and that he would forward my notes to development staff. That is disappointing given the lack of replies to my questions and additional troubleshooting steps that I offered. Oh well.

LatencyMon returns green, but wdf01000.sys is always at the top of my driver list with page faults or whatever other metric is used to sort that tab. Still, all is green in the report. I've gone through several pages worth of steps to make sure drivers and devices are disabled, updated, reinstalled, BIOS adjustments, disabling C-states, etc., etc., all to no success.

I have found a lot of discussion on the particular .sys driver noted above but not much in the way of explaining it or how to work around it, assuming that is even the issue (or just a bridge between issues). As noted in a previous reply, here, I too am using a Samsung EVO SSD. I cannot find a connection though, yet. The only thing I can seem to control is that if I switch my mixer to 44.1 sample rate then the crackling eases quite a bit to almost unnoticeable. It's really only at 48 that I hear this, and even then it acts like a peaking distorting but of course nothing is peaking.

I still need to test just using my old Focusrite box as my only interface to get my mixer out of the equation, then use my mixer's onboard recording (separate, and disconnected from the PC) to confirm it's not my mixer causing all of this. It will be much later in the week before I can do that though.

I should not that this static does not *appear *to be recording. So maybe that's some kind of clue as to where it does (or does not?) fall in my signal path.

Oh. I also read in one forum that someone discovered his USB3 controller was causing his static. I have not uninstalled mine to test. That makes me nervous getting it back up after the fact as everything else so far as just been a disable/enable toggle. This is only a straight uninstall, but I'm getting to the point that I don't care what I break.

I MAY move this over the the DAW/Windows 10 thread as it looks like most of the posts there are following much of the same patterns that I have. I will wait until I've had a chance to test my Focusrite and mixer in isolation, first.

Good luck to your issues! lol? I'll re-post if I discover anything new.


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