All audio suddenly crackly and distorted in Vista 64

[purplefire]

Hello Tom's Forum. Yesterday i was playing a game quite a bit, with no problems at all. Then, just before i went to bed, i installed a new driver for my graphics card, and installed three new updates for vista.

These were:

- "Security Update for Windows Vista for x64-based Systems (KB958644)"

- "Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista for x64-based Systems (KB955519)"

-"Update for Microsoft Silverlight (KB957938)"

However, today when i brought my computer out of hibernation, my game was quite laggy, so i rebooted, which also allowed the new drivers i installed to become active. So i loaded up my game once i reached windows, and the first thing i noticed was the very jumpy, stuttery, crackly music on the main menu of the game. You can hear the music, but it has lots of little ticks and crackles of varying intensity. It also happens for any music play back, and even the windows vista alert sound effects. So i re-installed the driver for my sound card, (which is a realtek HD), which didn't work. I updated my k-light audio codec pack, that didn't work either. I uninstalled the new windows updates apart from the silverlight patch as it wouldn't let me, and that didn't work either. Finally i just rolled back my graphics card drivers to the previous one. That didn't work either.

I have no idea what this could be. I have noticed that things seem to get visually laggy slightly just when the jumps in audio occur.
In the Realtek HD interface for configuring speakers, you can click on a speaker and it'll emit sound from that speaker. It will also give a little sound-wave animation that emanates from the image of the speaker. When i click a speaker and the audio is distorted, the animation also lags very slightly.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have a Q6600 processor and an 8800GT graphics card. As well as 4 gigs of ram.

Thanks!

 

[purplefire]

Also it sometimes says "Unable to play tone" when i click a speaker.

This forum won't let me edit my message for some reason.

 

[notherdude]

What motherboard you have?

On-board sound, right?

I think I might remove sound card from device manager, then disable it in BIOS, reboot, then re-enable in bios, then start fresh with newest sound card driver available.

If all that fails try system restore to undo that silverlight install too.

 

[purplefire]

I will try your suggestions. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L.

Incidentally, i just watched an episode of star trek on Tudou, and the audio was flawless. So it's not a global problem by the looks of things. But iTunes and WMP, as well as my game, are consistently bad.

 

[purplefire]

Seems as though in-game it's actually alright, but there is a tiny bit of lag which is odd. I'm not sure what's going on, there is nothing taking priority in task manager.

 

[4Ryan6]

What Game? I've noticed lag at times in FarCry 2, its rare but it does happen, no sound corruption though, and I'm running an AMD setup.

 

[purplefire]

Hmm, problem seems to have been resolved. Not entirely sure what it was, but i reinstalled a couple of drivers, and updates, and now the problem has been rectified. Thanks for those who made suggestions!

Now however, i have an even more serious problem. Often, whenever i wake my computer from sleep mode, it never fully restores. It comes back online, but the monitors stay off. Then if i hit reset, it boots slowly for a while, until i get a blue screen. It mentions something about failing to recover from a display driver failure (or something, i can never read enough of blue screens as they disappear so quickly). Then it reboots again, upon which vista loads up fine. I have been putting my computer to sleep for a couple of years now without incident, and i rely on it heavily. Any idea what this could be? Thanks!

 

[Zoron]

Sounds like corrupt video driver... uninstall and then install the latest.