Well, it has now struck me too. Case is, whenever I only do one thing (listen to mp3s or just play stuff in recording programs etc), it's completely fine, no crackling. But, as soon as I start doing something else - run DC++ in the background, browse through un-cached folders on my HDDs or anything similar, these very annoying crackles, pops and such start to infest the sound played. Having searched Google, it seems this is a very very common problem with all M-Audio sound cards, and happens regardless of DMA Latency settings and regardless of which drivers you use from M-Audio.
One of the solutions/culprits explained was having HDD DMA disabled, but since I naturally have DMA enabled, this is not the cause. But it still looks like it is heavily related to hard drive accesses, which would imply the DMA part. But it's not. That's what's the weird part
Anyone got any solutions or tricks? From the posts I've read from around, it seems that M-Audio has been aware of this issue since early 2004, and they've done nothing to cure it.
One of the solutions/culprits explained was having HDD DMA disabled, but since I naturally have DMA enabled, this is not the cause. But it still looks like it is heavily related to hard drive accesses, which would imply the DMA part. But it's not. That's what's the weird part
Anyone got any solutions or tricks? From the posts I've read from around, it seems that M-Audio has been aware of this issue since early 2004, and they've done nothing to cure it.