popping/skipping of ripped files

Ok, this is insane. It appears to be the Quickset utility in my case! Let me explain.

First off, the easiest way for me to recreate the sound distortion has been to boot up Oblivion where I can always hear the popping after I go to the main screen where you have the options to continue, load, etc.. If I sit there I can hear the popping intermittently in the background every few seconds at chaotic intervals. This is different than the popping/crackling that some of you are having at symmetric time intervals. The time intervals in my case are asymmetrical with the longest interval duration between pops being ~5 or more seconds. The shortest interval is around a half a second. I can also hear the popping upon playback of a movie. Those are the easiest ways to create it in my case, but I mainly test it with Oblivion because it's readily apparent within that game, but certainly not isolated to that specific program. Ok, on to my troubleshooting. I've done the following:

Tried both Dell 1500n and Intel 3945 cards with identical results leading me to the conclusion that it can't be one specific card.

Tried all the suggestions with disabling 802.11a band, changing BSS attributes, disabling enhancements in sound device properties, changing primary band to a/g, and I've played with countless other WLAN device attribute combinations within the driver properties along with various sigmatel device properties, all to no avail.

Tried various bios settings where I disabled pretty much all non-essential devices and ports to rule out some sort of bizarre resource or communication interference. Same sound distortions.

I've tried multiple sigmatel drivers, video drivers, WLAN drivers (for both Broadcom and Intel devices). The latest set of drivers is 100% Dell distributed drivers from the website, all with the latest revision. Same result.

I disabled the WLAN card completely through bios along with the bluetooth device. Same result. This confused me because up until this point it was looking to be a definite wireless issue, especially because people have all reported to have improvements with disabling bands, and what have you. So, I started shutting down system tray utilities just out of frustration because I had tried this before and didn't remember an improvement. I shut down every system tray utility that I could and amazingly the sound anomaly was improved. I rebooted, enabled the WLAN, reset bios to defaults, continued rebooting and allowed all tray programs to load. I made sure the distortion was still present. It was. I started shutting down applications one at a time and trying to recreate the distortion. When I shut down quickset, the distortions went away. I uninstalled quickset and rebooted the computer to let everything reload.

So... I've just finished booting back up into Oblivion and playing back video to check if the distortions are gone and they are at least 95 percent diminished. I would say 100 percent but my ears are so overly sensitive now that the single pop I might hear out of the entire test could be the result of a driver call accessing the device in some way, so who knows. What I do know is that it has made a tremendous effect on the sound distortions that I was having. Try uninstalling quickset, rebooting and see if it has any effect for you.

Message Edited by Groove75 on 03-30-2007 05:51 PM

I like that that's worked for you, Groove75, but I don't even have the quickset utility installed.

That's the bizarre thing. There seems to be no rhyme or reason correlating all the purported "solutions" that all of us seem to be having. 802.11a disable works for some people and has no effect on others. Scan interval to 3 minutes helps some, and now quickset helps me and I have re-analyzed it and can definitely attribute it to that specific utility alone which makes no sense. Ah well, it's worth a shot for any of you that have it installed. Chalk it up as one of the "things to try" on the list of possible solutions because for some odd reason, it has definitely made a difference in my case.

At least try shutting down all your system tray and non-essential apps and see if it has any effect which I'm sure most of you have already tried. Also, it would be helpful if everyone went into your user preferences and added your hardware profile to your signature. Just an idea that would help us all compare hardware profiles as we troubleshoot this thing.

You know, I take back what I said earlier.
Disabling 802.11a does help, but not by much. Having to disable it is just silly anyway.

While I can't speak for everybody allow me to say this. While listening to some sort of audio (it was more prevalent in spoken word audio than music), there was an audible click every 60 seconds. This "click" can best be defined as a distortion which seemed to cut the audio out for a few milliseconds 3 times, almost like a triple click or pop. If you went in to connect to a network and manually refreshed, then the exact same audio clicking was reproduced. This was extremely annoying to the point that it was unbearable. Disabling 802.11a fixed this. I think I still hear some popping (i would describe this a single click or pop) every once in a while, but I may have just become paranoid. If your sound distortion sounds like this, then maybe the wireless is at fault. If you have other kinds of sound distortion, maybe you need to research it more thoroughly so you can determine the source of the problem and try and fix it.

Well, there goes my "buy an intel 3945 card" as a solution. The Dell tech and his manager insisted that I not returned it since they were working on a solution. I appreciate that but still, it's quite frustrating.

I did some heavy testing last night and can say that the audio distortion isn't 100% gone, however removal of quickset has reduced the frequency by at least 90%. My distortion was definitely unlike what some of you are describing with these 60 sec / scan intervals. In my case, I think it has something to do with the sigmatel drivers.

As with you guys, (edit: or girls!) Groove75 and poochkie, I still hear a pop every once in a while. It doesn't really bother me though. I can play games and listen to music just fine (and of course do all of the non-audial things I do) so I'm happy with it, but I will definitely upgrade to a newer driver.

And to the few people that are complaining about disabling 802.11a... do you use it? I haven't actually seen a real-world use of 802.11a because of its odd frequency and special hardware needed. 802.11b came out, and quickly became the standard basically, and then 802.11a came out and really wasn't very popular. Then 802.11g came out and now that is the de-facto standard. Hopefully 802.11n will be widespread very soon, because I'm anxious for LAN (actually, better) speeds over wireless! Anyway I'm not saying you're wrong for complaining, it is unfortunate that we must disable a feature to make things work, but I really don't think I will ever use the 802.11a feature of my card.

Message Edited by Ricky_C on 03-31-2007 08:29 AM

It's not necessarily that I'm ever going to use 802.11a, it's just that it's something I (actually, my parents) paid extra for, so it shouldn't have to be disabled in order to make something else function correctly.

Well, I disabled the 802.11a as suggested and the popping sound seems to have abated (?)

My popping seems quieter and less frequent after ending the Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe)
But of course, without that, I don't have the option of Aero

Message Edited by StereoHeathen on 04-01-2007 05:00 AM

Disabling the 802.11a band worked for me. Thanks!