1903 and now 1909 creates an extremely annoying pop upon music start

I have a home built system with an INTEL motherboard which has been running with zero issues since I first installed Win7 and up to win10 1809.

The only "non standard" element is that I have disabled the onboard sound and do not use a soundcard, instead I use a Fostex USB connected DAC for my sound needs which works very well.

I have been running 1809 for a long time without ever experiencing this or any other issue. A while back my system was updated to 1903 which created a problem that creates a loud pop whenever I start to play a song. I reloaded an image of 1809 and no more pops so I disabled update and and waited for the next major update to see if the pop might have been resolved. Today I allowed the update to 1909 install and the pop has returned.

I have tried 3 different media players, re-enabled the onboard sound, used both the FOSTEX USB and Fiber inputs and the pops never go away.so it pretty much looks to me that some change originally made in the bowels of win10 is still there in 1909 so I would really like to get this resolved.

During all of my troubleshooting there is only one anomaly that I have noticed that might help someone smarter than me in the workings of windows sound processing to determine the nature of the problem - after I first start win10, the first song I play does NOT have the pop but all subsequent songs do?

If anyone could help I would be eternally grateful...

Have you updated the UAB DAC's firmware and USB drivers?

Berton said:

Does the pop return if you turn off all sounds [as a test]? Control Panel, Sound, Sounds tab, Sound Scheme item.

I turned the sound off as directed but the pop is still there.

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sandyt said:

Have you updated the UAB DAC's firmware and USB drivers?

Thanks for replying...I have the FOSTEX HP-A3 which, as far as I know, does not have drivers or firmware update capability...only whatever it loads when you plug in the USB cable. Device manager says it is working OK and has MS driver 10.0.18362.1

Have you tried un-checking the "allow this computer to turn off this device to save power", in the Power Management tab of Properties for all the USB device(s), in Device Manager? Root Hub, xTensible Host Controller, etc., all that have a Power Management tab.

You say your DAC is an external USB device, so maybe the power is getting cut off to the motherboard's USB interface (for the DAC) until you need to use it to play sound, at which time it is powered back on. Maybe this is causing the pop you describe.

Perhaps something about recent Windows Updates caused this option to get checked, when perhaps previously it was unchecked.

You have a desktop machine and it's plugged into wall power. This item is really intended for laptops running portable on battery, to save power. But it can have unexpected consequences.

Maybe.

thanks for the reply. Actually, while some external DACs might be designed for laptops, etc, the higher end units are designed not so much to save power but rather to provide higher audio quality than can typically be achieved with on board or sound card.

To answer your question, yes, I have unchecked the power management settings and several other suggestions found on the web.

I have also run the latency monitor/test programs with no problems experienced - system OK for sound/realtime use.

I am now convinced this problem is due to a basic coding issue introduced with versions 1903 and 1909 within the bowels of win10 that only Microsoft can fix. The icing on the cake of my assertion is that my system is designed with drive bays that allow me to swap drives containing different OS's. I recently swapped my LINUX drive with the Win10 drive and voila', perfect sound...no glitches, pops, scratches, nor any other of the audio gremlins that ruin listening to good music. All of the hardware in the systems remains exactly as it was when running the Win10 system...I should have done that first!

If you google up Win10 sound problems you will find that there is a huge percentage of people who had their systems automatically upgraded to version 1903 or 1909 are experiencing the same issues. Many professional musicians are unable to use their DAWs to record their music because of the poor quality sound...I consider myself lucky in comparison since the only issue I have is the loud pop at the beginning and an occasional dropout.

It would appear that the only way this problem will be resolved is for Microsoft to fix it.

If I didn't have so much invested in Win10 software I would move to Linux in a heartbeat. I'm getting so sick of "fixing" stuff that the Microsoft "mandatory you have little/zero to say about it" updates that seem to be more and more the norm these
days...

Anyhow, I'm back to running version 1809 with updates delayed for as long as the settings will allow while waiting for a fix...

This is an issue that goes back Windows 7. What is happening is that the audio channel is being opened the closed when it detects the start of a sound signal and then end, hence the popping. The issue is with the recording/mic side of things keeping the mic channel open. In Windows 10 go to settings, sounds and then select device properties for the input, disabling the input should stop the popping. In the old sound control panel going to recordings tab, properties, then from the advanced tab unticking "allow application to take exclusive control of this device" tick box would also rectify the issue.

Thanks for the suggestion but inasmuch I have reverted back to 1809 I'm not going to actually test it at this point. I suspect it won't actually wouldn't work in my case anyhow since I have the onboard sound turned off and I have zero input devices on my system...the only sound thingy on my PC is the USB connected DAC. I did check the settings on 1809 and they are all turned off which would have been the way they were most likely set on 1903/1909 since that is the way I set them on any new update.