The crackling and pops were so constant that I thought I had some sort of grounding issue on my room, I went as far as replacing my entire audio system and isolating the machine from any other electric device.
I don’t know if this is useful but I’m able to recreate and “fix” the crackling issue. @MarkusHoHo
System specs:
I9-12900ks
32GB DDR5
3090 FE.
3 x samsung pro pcie 4.0 nvmes
If I run the ram in stock mode (4800MHz) the audio is bad, I get frequent cracks and pops. The audio gets significantly worse the more you reduce the ram frequency.
In the other hand, if I overclock the RAM modules to 6800MHz, the audio issues are reduced greatly.
From my testing the biggest factors to recreate the audio issues are:
– NVMe drives are under load.
– RAM not keeping up.
I tried this with different RAM sticks and NVMe models from different vendors and the results were consistent across all of them. I was able to get less audio cracks with newer DDR5 sticks that have lower latency.
Another way to replicate the issue is trying to use the system with only 1 stick of ram, the audio will be unbearable despite the overall system being responsive (running IDEs, debuggers and other demanding software).
The audio format does not seem to be that important, at least in my case, changing the sample rate and bit depth didn’t help in reducing the latency.
Finally, it could be that my speakers arent the best but I wasn’t able to hear cracks when using them ( I didn’t have any DPC latency spike either ).
I only get the audio issues consistently while using any sort of headset (with or without DAC).