Here,

https://www.dell.com/community/Precision-Fixed-Workstations/Precision-5820-U3415W-popping-from-connected-speakers/m-p/7317212

I think there could be some more thread but this one should be enough

Hello,

I think you may be able to find other threads here about this very issue. And it's caused by power saving settings associated with the audio driver.

There's a workaround ( now i don't know if I have enough time to search it and link it for you, sadly ) that supposedly works, even if apparently is not permanent or 100% effective ( by memory of the thread ).

Basically was something about powering down the audio hw (too aggressively) after a very short time ( in seconds ) of inactivity ( aka no sound played ). The action of powering it back up causes those noises.

At least, that was the issue ( going by memory ) with the audio outputted directly from the audio out jack.

I hadn't tested the jack out but just listened to nearly 8 minutes of a continuous tone without it popping once, so no problem there. 

(that I know of) Sound pops when using GPU to smart TV via DPort to HDMI & through the Dell USB Soundbar. 

It doesn't happen using the headphone out, nor via bluetooth USB dongle to headset. 

Ah, yes indeed, I forgot to mention that: I followed those posts and tried the fix but it made no difference. 

Thanks for pointing that out. 

Mmmm,

what about using a live linux distribution and test the audio ( gpu + usb ) ?

This would show if it's windows ( and its drivers/chipset ) or is something else

Good thinking, Mazzinia - thanks, I'll give that a go and report back. 

Yeah same thing on Ubuntu, so...something else...

I'm not liking a lot this... let me recap :

board changed , and issue keeps being present, no matter the OS used. "but" is not present if using the 3.5 jack.

Do you happen to have some other gpu to swap in, to test if the issue keeps happening ? The way I see it, it's clearly an hardware problem ( linux demonstrates it ), and the question is : is a design flaw / production flaw of a batch of motherboards ( clearly very recent ones ) ?

Being a new unit, it could be that the motherboards xyz produced in the timeframe abc , aka lot1234, have a defect / got some chip that has a defect / and so on.

If yes, I guess dell would have to keep swapping until finding a good one ( or check before shipping, and so on ).

But I pointed at the gpu because what if is the gpu causing this, and somehow affecting as a backslash, the usb ? Thus testing with a different gpu, old basic whatever, could help to exclude this possibility ( if not testing audio from the gpu, still would be possible to test the audio from the usb while using a different gpu )

Yeah can't be the GPU. The first machine was an AMD WX7100, while they gave me an RTX 4000 Nvidia this time. Not decided yet what I think of that, but that's another story... 

So, that's 3 boards and 2 GPUs on 2 different systems. I'm stumped for what else to try. 

My feeling is that it's a design or production issue like you say. It's possible that not many people would notice this, and perhaps likely that others using sound on this kinda machine also have a soundcard/external interface. I have a PCIe soundcard I'm yet to fit, but that doesn't solve the problem. I still use the USB soundbar (soundcard doesn't have USB), so I'll have to live with it. 

I'm certainly not opening another ticket for it. I've had enough fun for the year.

The rtx4000 should have a bit more punch than the amd, I think

It would be interesting to find more owners that could test audio, at least from the gpu. (I would be curious enough to test my 7820, but i've no options to check the gpu for audio, and no usb audio hw nor someone to borrow one, sadly)