Popping and Crackling

Cadder · 28 Jan 2021 at 19:07

Hi all,

I bought Creative Pebble V3 speakers recently and I'm impressed with the sound quality for the price of them. They connect to the PC via USB-C - they didn't work via the X570 Tomahawk USB-C port (I didn't persist or troubleshoot it was just a quick try) so I used the USB adaptor that came with them and they have worked fine with just one problem.

Popping/cracking/crackling.

I can't quite figure out what is causing it. In Zoom meetings it only pops and crackles when the same people are talking quiet. When other speak, there's no issue. On some YouTube videos it happens from time to time.

Is this an inherent problem with these speakers? Should I send them back?

On Device Manager, the driver is a Microsoft driver, version 10.0.19041.1.

Can anyone help me please?

Demon · 29 Jan 2021 at 09:16

It could be a number of things, I can only hazard a slightly educated guess.

1. If it's only on faint speech and I see they advertise the speakers as having "Clear Dialog Enhancement", this could well be a digital signal processing issue (i.e. Software within the device, or possibly in their drivers). I say this simply as to enhance dialog you are going to have to try to perform some processing to compress (i.e squash a wide range of frequencies in to a narrower band) and normalise voices so quiet voices need amplifying, and loud voices need attentuating, etc.. This is most likely done digitally via some form of software algorithm..
2. Is could be there end.. We had many issues using online meetings, terrible audio, pops, crackles, feedback ,etc.. Most microphones or microphone inputs apply processing for similar reasons, to normalise volumes, compress it for clarity, etc..
2. Since the speakers are USB powered, and have a minimum power requirement, there is also a chance that it might be caused by your motherboard, but I'd honestly expect the issue to manifest itself at high volumes rather than low volumes, so not likely to be that, but always a consideration.

We had loads of random issues with everyone's 'setups' in work so I bought everyone Jabra Speak 510's which are USB powered desktop speaker/microphone and it's been a revelation, no more weird feedback, everyone is intelligable and because it's designed for that purpose, it's very good at rejecting unwanted noises etc..
It's worked out so well during audits that our notified bodies auditors now use the same ones..

koeiwong · 2 Feb 2021 at 09:48

Demon said:
2. Since the speakers are USB powered, and have a minimum power requirement, there is also a chance that it might be caused by your motherboard, but I'd honestly expect the issue to manifest itself at high volumes rather than low volumes, so not likely to be that, but always a consideration.
.

Your last point seem to be the case on the issue, I have the same speaker and if I turn the volume button on the speaker to 50% or below does stop the popping or just too low which I can't hear it.

Also I connected the speaker to my phone using the usb c port and popping issue still exist if volume on the speaker over 50%.

No issue using the speaker with my x570 tomahawk usb c port.

Cadder · 13 Mar 2021 at 09:16

I haven't noticed any crackling recently, so hopefully driver and BIOS updates have cleared the issue.

Interestingly, I am experiencing keyboard and mouse stutter as per the recent issue. TR claims it also causes speaker problems. I wonder if all of it is related..

https://www.techradar.com/uk/amp/ne...-cpus-but-patch-wont-roll-out-for-a-while-yet

Neil79 · 15 Mar 2021 at 13:07

Not sure what graphics card you have, but for the Nvidia drivers the 461's are known to also cause popping and crackling

TaKeN · 29 Mar 2021 at 09:49

Neil79 said:
Not sure what graphics card you have, but for the Nvidia drivers the 461's are known to also cause popping and crackling

I reinstalled Windows 10 yesterday to try and get rid of the popping and cracking!

Do you know which drivers are safe to use 'Pop Free' as such? Thanks

Neil79 · 29 Mar 2021 at 09:59

TaKeN said:
I reinstalled Windows 10 yesterday to try and get rid of the popping and cracking!

Do you know which drivers are safe to use 'Pop Free' as such? Thanks

457.51

TaKeN · 29 Mar 2021 at 12:06

Neil79 said:
457.51

Thank you kindly!

Richard Slater · 11 Apr 2021 at 19:01

If you are getting issues with cutouts, pops, crackles and/or delayed audio then it's might be related to Deferred Procedure Calls (DPCs). You can trivially diagnose this by running LatencyMon. In my case the issues were caused by the Dell DataVault virtual device driver, which explained why a the identical NVidia drivers on my Razer Blade 15 didn't cause any problems, but the Dell was a car crash from a realtime audio perspective.