Random Popping audio under Vista

[plettner]

I am running Vista Home Premium (sans TV Pack) on two computers with very different hardware.

Both exhibit audio pops and clicks randomly through Live TV, DVD playback, and even AVI (DivX) playback.

Both installations are clean and both mediacentres have different audio. My main mediacentre (Asus P5N32-E SLI) has a Soundmax chipset from Analog Devices, while my second one (which I am reloading but with a 64-bit version of Vista) is using a Realtek chipset. This one is using an Asus P5KC as the motherboard.

The drivers are the latest from Asus' website.

I'm not sure what this could be. I don't remember the popping and clicking ocurring under Windows XP MCE. But there I was using a nVidia PureVideo MPEG decoder?

Any hints on what I should try first?

I should also mention that I am using a 3.5mm jack to my LCD television on the main PC and a 2-speaker system (also using a 3.5mm audio lead) on the second system.

[StarTV]

I was getting discorded sound until I went into the sound/volume(??) under control panel. there is an advance setting somewhere and I had to change the audio quality to max setting which is high/studio...something like that. That cured my sound distortion problem. Give that a try.

[plettner]

I had the settings on 48kHz, 24 Bits.

I might try the highest settings (192kHz)

I found another post elsewhere which said to remove the third-party drivers and use th ein-built Vista ones. This made no different but the OP was experiencing slightly different problems.