realtek driver popping sound when restarting or waking or sleeping

I have realtek audio on my gigabyte z270n-wifi motherboard. Using the driver from the gigabyte website (recently released for 1903), or using ANY other realtek driver I have been able to find of various vintages, I always get a loud popping sound from my speakers when I restart or wake up or sleep. Its just one "pop", the same sound you might hear if you turned up your living room stereo's volume then yanked out the speaker cord. This did not happen in windows 7, only windows 10, which is new to me. I'm on 1903.

If I replace the realtek driver with the "High Definition Audio Device" microsoft driver 10.0.18362.1 the problem disappears BUT I lose access to advanced features like the equalizer. Is this a problem others are having, and what should I do?

this is common actually specially with desktops and is driver related and no one can quite figure out why or what causes it.

some say it is a debug sound generated by the driver to wake the hardware up in case it was set to disable itself to save power over long period of not being used.

others say it is caused by socket auto detection of what is plugged in where sometimes setting the sockets to manual might eliminate it but sometimes this doesn't work .

you might have to either try nagging the manufacturer for a fix or learn to live with it.

P.S you can also try installing the win 7 driver in compatibility mode , might work.

Thanks, that has led to some progress
The pop comes both when I go from a live desktop and into sleep, and also when I go from sleep to a live desktop.
But after selecting "disable front panel jack detection" it is now silent when going from sleep to the desktop.
It still does pop when going from the desktop into sleep.
Win7 driver in compatibility mode produces same pop.
Half a dozen older realtek drivers also produce a pop.
So something is happening when it goes to sleep. Any ideas?

johnhoh said:

Thanks, that has led to some progress
The pop comes both when I go from a live desktop and into sleep, and also when I go from sleep to a live desktop.
But after selecting "disable front panel jack detection" it is now silent when going from sleep to the desktop.
It still does pop when going from the desktop into sleep.
Win7 driver in compatibility mode produces same pop.
Half a dozen older realtek drivers also produce a pop.
So something is happening when it goes to sleep. Any ideas?

well i am assuming you tried setting all sockets including back ones to being "line out/speaker" where due and "line in/mic" where due instead of "auto detection/sense" , if you did and the problem still persist like i said this is as far as forums can buy you , its global and a get used to symptom .

and P.S do not confuse yourself by trying to solve it from windows side , there are zillion laptops that don't suffer from those symptoms and they use sleep , shut down and hibernate more often than a desktop would , so yea trust me its driver related and only manufacturer (either realtek or mobo) can answer to that and they kinda don't