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17 R5, crackling/popping sound
I own an AW 17 R5 with all the bells-and-whistles ( eg. Intel Core-i9 8950HK CPU, 32GiB RAM etc. ). Just a few days ago I noticed that I was getting popping and/or crackling sounds *anytime* sound was played back ( I'm running on Windows 10 x64 Microsoft Windows Version 20H2 (OS Build 19042.572) ). As far as I can tell, it's not coming from just one speaker but both, so that mostly eliminates the problem being a hardware failure of one of the speakers. I did an extensive google search on this issue and I couldn't find any satisfactory resolution. This is just yet another one of the many design flaws and other problems that I've had to deal with with my AW 17 R5 and issues constantly popping up is getting a little old, especially when this laptop is only two years old
If anyone has any suggestions or has experienced similar problems then a friendly reply would be greatly appreciated
Thanks,
jdb2
jdb2
85 Posts
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09-11-2020 11:00 AM
Well, I think I solved the problem by rolling back the Realtek audio driver(s) to version 6.0.8928.1 ( 3/31/2020 ). Previously, there had been a Microsoft driver that was installed in a recent update. From what I can tell, many people are having problems with the recent Realtek audio driver(s) provided by Microsoft due to an incompatibility and Microsoft apparently has no official ETA when they are going to fix the problem.
I'll mark this post as solved if I don't experience any audio issues in the next few days.
jdb2
Alienware Area-51 ALX 2006
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09-11-2020 13:00 PM
that’s the reason why the older laptops had the best speakers as they could play 32bit audio at 192000Hz and that was pretty high quality and there was no crackling.
Most people who have an issue like you are the ones having a driver issue so you installing the Realtek one was the most smartest.
jdb2
85 Posts
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22-11-2020 10:00 AM
Well, the crackling / popping / distortion is back. It seems that rolling back the driver(s) doesn't do much. Dell really needs to figure out what the problem is -- I didn't pay over $4.5K+ USD for a laptop whose sound system is faulty.
jdb2
Alienware Area-51 ALX 2006
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22-11-2020 13:00 PM
I have used these laptops before and by all means 8t shouldn’t happen on the 17 r5. The reason for older laptops was because of optimus but now you can switch the gpu yourself.