Sound problem: cracling/popping/chopping sound, directx re-installation won't help

[RedX]

Hi all

 

I encounter the following problem with sound.

 

Game: A-10C beta2, beta3 both at 1920x1200 full screen, default install.

 

When: In game, most of the time. Paused, non-paused. It does not happen (badly) when looking at clear sky or something that clearly brings the load on the CPU/GPU/computer in general down.

 

What happens: Sound makes clicking/crackling/snapping/popping sound. In short intervals well below 1 second, the sound disappears and returns. The "cut" and "return" of the sound is accompanied by a loud pop. This happens frequently so that the total effect is a crackling sound on top of the normal sounds. After some time the sound may disappear completely or screw up the sounds entirely. After some more time the sounds may come back, but again with the crackling effect or as totally distorted noise and disappear after some time again.

Any other game like GTA4, Black Shark, ARMA2, LockOn FC2 does not produce this effect.

Instead, after DCS A-10C has messed up the audio, all the other programs on the computer are also affected - even if DCS A-10C is shut down completely. E.g., the MP3 player makes cracks and pops, too. Until reboot.

 

Sound card: Soundblaster Audigy 4. When I switched to motherboard's soundMAX chip, the crackling sound is replaced by sound disappearing, i.e., the sound disappears in similar very short intervals but the "cutting" of the sound will not make a pop each time but the audio is just silent for a fraction of a second repeatedly. So the problem is there with other sound drivers too.

 

Other hardware: Intel Q9550 overclocked to 3.84GHz, ASUS P5Q motherboard, 4GB memory (>3GB in use due to windows XP), nvidia 8800GTS 512MB display card (driver version 197.45), windows XP sp3 and manually installed redist-directx package.

 

What made no difference so far: messing around with hardware drivers; windowed mode; changing any in-game graphics settings high-med-low or HDR, TSSAA, MSAA; killing other processes or turning off trackir; changing 3D options like buffering, anisotropic filtering, etc. in nvidia control panel; changing audio options like 2 speakers, headset, EAX, etc.; reinstalling game with or without directx package.

 

What seems to help: reducing resolution to 1600x1200 or so (although a couple of cracks can be heard at the start of mission when un-pausing); or having a view at 1920x1600 so that nothing complicated is visible, like the HUD, terrain, buildings, mountains at a distance or anything but sky or something. When something comes into view, the sound problem occurs again.

 

Just having higher FPS alone does not seem to do it, the effect can occur with both low and high average FPS. It varies 5-30 depending on the settings and scenery viewed. I would understand if it seemed to be just FPS issue but there is something else to it. Windows XP problem?

 

(edit: OC'ing the cpu should have no effect; it is stable for 48h tests with, e.g., prime95.)

 

I'll attach dxdiag output and an MP3 sample of the effect to this post.

 

Any help or ideas to get this fixed are appreciated.

Edited November 21, 2010 by RedX

[c0ff]

In the game directory, create Config/autoexec.cfg file with the following line

sound.buffersize = 8192

[RedX]

Thank you for the help.

 

However, and unfortunately, this did not help with the "popping" sound problem. The audio is lagging noticeably, though. Especially so if using higher values than 1024.

 

Any other suggestions?

[c0ff]

Thanks for checking, it narrows the search field.

However, I don't have an immediate answer.

[goldfinger35]

This is (probably) unrelated, but I have a crackling sound when using cockpit (F1) view with engines on.

I am pretty sure the problem is in following files:

A10BackEngine.ogg and A10FrontEngine.ogg

 

Note that I can hear that crackling even if I open those files in Winamp. Crackling sound can be heard only in these two files.

Is it related to my PC or is it just recorded like that?

 

Sys specs are in my sig.

[Nate--IRL--]

They both sound fine here in winamp. Try adjusting volumes in the windows mixer control?

 

Nate

[goldfinger35]

I have tried modifying my sound drivers, uninstalling, installing again, changing settings etc but no luck; A10BackEngine.ogg still has that clicking sound (like old gramophone record) every 2 sec.

I am pretty sure it is in the file because no other files have that (except A10FrontEngine.ogg, 05 seconds after start).

 

 

 

Edit: I have tried playing those two files on three different computers and crackling can be heard on all of them (barely on speakers and pretty noticeable with headphones).

Edited December 5, 2010 by goldfinger35

[RedX]

Is it possible that my sound clipping problem is related to graphics rendering somehow? Freemem reports weird numbers on video memory usage, such as -2.5GB available (yes, negative number). A wild guess: could it be that my whole system including the sound threads are halted for a very short time when the drivers are importing stuff in the video memory from main memory, and that when there are objects in view, for some reason the game does this repeatedly resulting in the clipping/popping/crackling sound effect? Graphics seems to be twitching simulatneously. Hmm. Can it be checked that the game recognizes the amount of video memory correctly?

[c0ff]

A wild guess: could it be that my whole system including the sound threads are halted for a very short time when the drivers are importing stuff in the video memory from main memory, and that when there are objects in view, for some reason the game does this repeatedly resulting in the clipping/popping/crackling sound effect?

 

It's quite possible. Looks like something is wrong on the OS level:

 

all the other programs on the computer are also affected - even if DCS A-10C is shut down completely. E.g., the MP3 player makes cracks and pops, too. Until reboot

 

Btw, FC2 uses the same sound engine. And you report no problems with it....

[goldfinger35]

Other hardware: Intel Q9550 overclocked to 3.84GHz.

 

Maybe this is your problem? Try lowering it to default values and see what happens.

 

Maybe try plugging your sound card into other slots.

 

Also, try this: unplug your sound card and use one on the motherboard.

Edited December 9, 2010 by goldfinger35

[RedX]

Thanks for the suggestions, goldfinger.

 

Actually, I did try the on-board sound card (result: no crackling but just silent gaps in sound equivalent in time scale, less than a second). Other slots I didn't try so far.

 

However, I was very very surprised to note that stock speeds got rid of the sound problem, since any other program including "torture tests" on the system show no problems when overclocked to the current values. Of course the performance suffers when using stock speeds.

 

Naturally, I checked into this a little deeper: It seems that, while overclocking the processor does not cause my problems, the increased frequency of the memory chips at 1088 MHz gives audio problems and at 901 MHz they are gone (the memory chip speed options are in steps only using my settings). The screen occasionally has stutters when i would expect sound pops, though, but maybe this is the same that everyone else is getting (when many mountains or other objects are visible, for example), i.e., other than sound problems.

 

I was not able to find anything useful by googling on this. Perhaps some sync problem with motherboard/processor - video card or motherboard - sound card ? And, in this case, why any other program/game does not have problems? And, maybe there are options in BIOS to remedy this? ASUS boards seem to have a lot of undocumented options for tweaking and overclocking.

 

This is very interesting.

Edited December 11, 2010 by RedX

[hobbes57]

I'm experiencing the exact same problem here, only with DCS:World 1.2.0, flying the Ka-50. After a while, the sound crackles, cracks, turns completely off and comes back on again to more cackling. This continues even after DCS was shut down.

 

Interestingly, I've noticed the same when playing another graphically demanding game (Empire :Total War).

 

No overclocking of my ASUS board, though. Running on windows 7 64bit.

 

RedX, did you even find a cause/solution for this issue?

[cichlidfan]

You might try a PM, its been six months since his last post and that post is REALLY old.

[RedX]

My apologies for not posting the solution. It's mentioned above but not clearly.

 

The sound problem was caused by the RAM chips. Keeping them close to stock speeds while overclocking the CPU worked fine. A few months after posting the above I replaced the memory chips and never had the sound problem since, even when overclocking. My other problems (graphics glitches, crashes) were solved by going for 64bit Windows.

 

If the source of your sound trouble is the same as mine was, you may be able to narrow down the crackling sound issue to the RAM chips by underclocking your system, memory only, or testing with a chip set known to work well.

 

Wish you luck.

[hobbes57]

Thanks for your suggestions here, RedX. Unfortunately, I have a pretty standard (ASUS + i7 processor) system and never did any overclocking / tuning that I'm aware of. I'll hunt around and look for memory clocking options, see if that helps any.

 

The maddening thing is that this occurs not reliably. About 80% of the time when I play, but sometimes not at all. No direct relation to hot/cool CPU temperatures either, as far as I'm able to observe.

 

Will struggle on.

[hobbes57]

Usually, after ~20 minutes of crackling, sound going on/off DCS crashes. I'm attaching the files from the DCS\Logs folder. There seem to be some sound-related entries but I'm not sure if they are helpful.

 

me.log.txt

 

DCS-20120829-182624.crash.txt

 

dcs.log.txt

[djembe]

I have same problem after install DCS:A-10C.

 

I thought it was a problem with my sound card, but now I see I'm not the only one.

[hobbes57]

For me, the cause seemed to be a faulty (overclocked at some point?) motherboard. Replacing the memory modules with new ones did not solve the issue.

 

I finally decided to build a new system altogether and with a new motherboard (plus the old memory modules, graphics and sound card) everything is fine. No cackling.

 

Lesson learned: Don't play around with overclocking settings on your system unless you know what you're doing. I didn't and apparently something on the motherboard got fried.

[mpdugas]

Does Device Manager show that there are no device conflicts in your system?

[Kholsaet]

Sound Problems on DCS World after upgrading to EVGA 690

 

Hi,

 

Glad to have found this thread, but I was wondering if this has been resolved as yet. I am experiencing the symptoms as they have been described by others- Cracking/Popping sounds when the graphics card is under load. I did not have this problem until recently when I upgraded from a EVGA G-Force GTX 260 to the GTX 690. For example, Things will appear to be running well, and then I'll turn on the TGP and there is a lot of popping and static in the sound channel. Sometmes I start the SIM and immediately have noise in the Sound channel. At first I thought this was due to a conflict or a deffective card, however after having tried this on a number of other games at max settings - Skyrim, Shogun Total War - and running 3D Max with music playing in the background I have not been able to reproduce the skipping/popping noises I observe in DCS.

 

My configuration is as Follows:

 

Asus P6T6 running the most recent BIOS (903 I think) Onboard Sound is disabled in the BIOS

Intel I-7 965 @ 3.2 GHz

12 GB RAM

GTX 690 - Connected through miniport to HDMI on monitor

 

Any Help with this would be greatly appreciated.