Audio crackling/popping in Chrome. Pagefaults?

[Shawn221]

I experience static crackling/popping sounds when I switch between Chrome tabs while playing a youtube video. I believe it has something to do with hard pagefaults (screenshot below). Ask away for any additional information you need, specs are in my signature. http://imgur.com/a/f8Roj

 

[jdlech]

I would check for duplicate audio drivers first. You should only have 1 audio driver per output device. A lot of video cards like to install their own audio drivers during updates. So, you should have only 1 analog and 1 digital sound driver. More of either can make it sound like crackling whenever something invokes both drivers simultaneously.
Look under Audio Inputs and Outputs in the Device Manager.

 

[Shawn221]

I would check for duplicate audio drivers first. You should only have 1 audio driver per output device. A lot of video cards like to install their own audio drivers during updates. So, you should have only 1 analog and 1 digital sound driver. More of either can make it sound like crackling whenever something invokes both drivers simultaneously.
Look under Audio Inputs and Outputs in the Device Manager.

Yeah there's just NVIDIA's driver and the Realtek one. Disabling everything but Realtek still doesn't fix the problem. I also noticed when I had youtube playing in the background and I opened an email with a lot of gifs and graphics, the noise is very obvious and you can hear the video actually slow down.

 

[jdlech]

That's probably because of all the hard drive thrashing. I ended up uninstalling my NVIDIA audio drivers completely.

There's two things to try. First, you can try rolling back to a previous version of your video driver. Second is to try uninstalling your video driver entirely, rebooting and letting Windows reinstall it.
Well, you could also try uninstalling the video driver, and then manually reinstalling the latest from your card manufacturer.
In any case, just make sure there's only 1 audio driver when you're done.
Aside from that, I'm a bit at a loss. It's obviously a software problem - which is a good thing; costs nothing to fix.