Mushy crackling sound on HP Spectre x360 15

I have an HP Spectre x360 15-ch00x laptop. Windows 10 Pro, winver 19041.630.

It has a very annoying sound problem. I get crackling sounds, almost sort of mushy sounding, during louder passages. But it doesn't have to be loud, it can happen during normal speech or even relatively quiet music. It's sometimes accompanied by very short dropouts in the sound. It makes it very unpleasant to listen to music or movies, and even speech is annoying.

It's not consistent. I can replay the same snippet of sound and it will crackle differently, at different times.

It doesn't seem to be associated with any particular piece of hardware. For example it bothers me the most when I'm listening to my external speakers, which are plugged into the headphone jack. But I also hear cutouts/crackling (though the crackle is less noticeable) with a small USB speaker. There is very little common (audio) hardware on those two paths. Does the sound headed for a USB speaker even go through the laptop's soundcard?? Or does it send digital signals over USB and the speaker converts it to analog?

I have tried every driver (Realtek and Microsoft) without improvement. When I installed the recently-released Realtek driver I thought that had fixed it, but within a few days it started up again. Currently running Microsoft driver 10.0.19041.1.

Um. That's odd. I thought I had last installed the Realtek driver 6.0.8940.1 Rev.B released on 5/5/20 ... I just installed the Realtek driver again, and in a quick test, my sound is clean.

Could Windows have reverted to the Microsoft driver without my permission??

- - - Updated - - -

24 hours later I noticed crackling. Sure enough, it's back to the Microsoft driver.

How do I get it to leave my chosen driver alone!?

dalchina said:

Considering the issue of crackle:
Try downloading and running LatencyMon (free)

Yes, this does often sound like buffer underrun -- like the audio driver can't keep up. And in fact LatencyMon says "Your system appears to be having trouble handling real-time audio and other tasks. You are likely to experience buffer underruns appearing as drop outs, clicks or pops." I don't know why -- it's a 3+ GHz CPU with 16GB of RAM. I'll see if I can decipher the LatencyMon reports and determine what's causing it.

I may also try locking the audio driver with the tools you mentioned. The newest Realtek driver seems to work well, until Microsoft stomps on it.

Thanks for the pointers!

It may be hard-fault related. I was running half a dozen Linux VMs, with 15 GB in use. It seemed a bit better when I shut down the VMs, but then before long it started going nuts again. The ISR and DPC times seem to be driven by ACPI.sys and tcpip.sys.

With VMs gone and 8GB free, it's still averaging over 2000 hard faults per minute.

- - - Updated - - -

I started looking at the "block one device from updating driver" procedure. You're supposed to select the Hardware ID of the device you want to freeze. Well ALL of my audio devices, speakers AND microphones, have the SAME Hardware ID, and none of them are using the "path" type of ID. They're all MMDEVAPI\AudioEndpoints.

Do you think the group policy will work on that?

I definitely need to figure this out. It seems to be getting worse. Now in addition to the sound breaking up more than it was, the system is getting sluggish when responding to keystrokes (sometimes a second or three), and the mouse is getting jerky.

If I can't figure this out, I may have to back everything up and do a wipe-and-install.

It appeared the Realtek driver worked pretty well, but it never stayed long enough to really test it out. Within hours it would get hijacked by the Microsoft driver, and the crackles/stutters would be back.

I thought 20H2 was supposed to be pushed out. But it's been 2 months and I still didn't have it. So I forced an update to 20H2, and that seems to have improved things A LOT.

I've been listening to music for almost an hour. No crackles, no stutters.
No jerky mouse response.
No laggy responds to keyboard events.

LatencyMon has been running for half an hour. It says my system "appears to be having trouble" but it's much better than it was. I'm getting about 100-150 hard faults per minute, with 50% of RAM in use. Worst DPC time is 2156 usec, worst interrupt-to-process latency is 884 usec. Other numbers look fine.

So I'll run with it for a while and see how it works, but this appears to have fixed it. I'll be watching to see if the audio-sync problem is fixed too -- my audio frequently gets 1-2 sec out of sync with the video. Happens with any video player. Very very distracting for movie dialog or anything that has sound happening in sync with action in the video.

Thanks for the pointers!

Hm. I finished listening to music and went back to work, and... now LatencyMon is showing about 30k faults in the last 20 minutes, max int time of 83547 usec, max DPC time of 83533 usec. That's 50-100x worse than it was before, running with less system load than I was before. So I guess I still have some driver experimentation in my future.