Audio crackling/popping when I interact with Windows10

I got to this thread as I was having issues with popping suddenly on my Edifier MR4 Speakers/Monitors.

I use an M-Audio M-Track Solo connected via USB to my PC, and the speakers are connected through this device.

I was having some popping that I thought was coming from my browser, as activity in Chrome seemed to cause the most constant popping even when no sound was being played. I messed with everything - drivers, cables, Fast Start... Nothing helped.

...and then, quite by accident, I just turned the Output volume down on the M-Track, from ~9 to ~5, and increased the volume out from the PC - so essentially had the same volume coming from the speakers, and the popping vanished 😂

I mention this as others here also mentioned an M-Audio device.

Thank you so much! This was messing my spotify up and the first video really helped me. Props to your expertise and humbleness to help those in need.

I have had the buzzing sound issue for many years on my work laptops.

And I suspected it was a power saving 'feature'.

Finally a third line support person was able to disable the power saving and now the buzzing noise is gone.

She did it through the registry.

Funny that everybody is always thinking about updating driviers. This could never be about drivers.

Everybody needs to shut up about updating drivers. Updating drivers has literally never fixed anything for me ever.

My advice is to set everything to maximum perfomance and turn off any power saving 'features'

Go to settings

then system

then power & sleep

then additional power settings

Select a 'maximum perfomance' power plan or if you cannot do that, good luck with getting a third line support person to do sowmthing similar.

But now I have the loud pop after 170 seconds of no audio

Then when I play audio I get the loud pop again.

I really think this is also a power saving feature somewhere. I never had this issue on any of my home computers that are always on 'maximum perfomance'.

Here we go again!!!!

The previous poster may discover, like i previously did, that that general solution (disabling the driver) only temporarily resolves the issue and it will gradually return over the next several weeks.

It's a most tricky sort of problem, that seems to have a number of possible causes.

In my case, one of the contributing causes seems to be my 8-year-old power supply, maybe. I bought a new power supply recently and after i installed it, the problem either went away or else became almost unnoticeable.

But then i put the original old power supply back in again (i decided i wanted to use the new power supply in a different computer), and, mirabile dictu, the crackling returned again just like before.

The old power supply still seems to work okay, as far as the computer generally is concerned, but maybe it's lost a little of its smoothness in its old age, and the more sensitive audio circuitry is noticing. These things happen.

But at any rate, i'm building a brand new Windows 11 box (with that new power supply), so hopefully this whole problem will become moot for me soon. At least for another seven years...

To resolve the audio problem 100%, first install your driver, then disable Windows fast startup in the power management.

Then go to the device manager, sound, video and game controller, look for your audio device, right click, disable, restart your computer.

when your computer starts, you enable the device again .

Okay, the audio popping problem has been resolved!