I don't think the RAID is causing the problem. Disable the Integrated audio, in the BIOS, since you are not using that to see if it makes any difference. Many Dell's show "legacy audio" as the integrated audio in the BIOS.
I'm trying to think of what else to do, I used to work the Dell forums and the popping and crackling was a fairly common complaint.
Unfortunately there is not a "one fix". What works on one PC to fix it may not work on another.
So I don't have a speaker to test, but I had an old pair of ear bud headphones that I put in the audio jack. After testing for about 20 minutes I can say that there is no audio popping when using them. So it seems like an issue with playback from the USB. I don't know if that helps or not.
You know what, I think disabling the integrated audio from the BIOS might have worked. Gave it a good 30 minutes of videos just to be sure. Odd that disabling it from the device manager didn't work, but I'm not complaining. It was probably always disabled, but I must have turned it on self consciously when disabling my RAID. Thanks for all your help fireberd. Now everything is running perfectly.
Actually turns out it didn't solve the issue, I still get moderate amounts of popping, apparently restarting my computer fixes a lot of the popping issue, but it doesn't go away permanently, which is why I thought it worked. However, the popping seems to be really bad after freshly booting my computer up. Maybe its a program doing something on startup? My anti virus Trend Micro is the only thing that I really have as a start up application. Or it could all just be a complete coincidence and it pops when it wants to.
Last edited by Kerf; 08 Sep 2015 at 11:38.
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