Audio Crackles and DPC Latency

well, of course, you have tried turning off devices and processes and seen which ones are creating the most latency, right? 
Frequently, the problem may be the internal sound card or the LAN connection.

What does DPCLat report? 
What does DPCLat report when LatencyMon is running?
Does the value really drop - or does LatencyMon just report a much lower value?
What audio driver are you using? (hopefully ASIO)
What is your audio driver's latency set to?

stress testing plugins with DPC checkers is not useful - audio latency and DPC latency are two different things.

high DPC latency is typically caused by hardware, or drivers servicing that hardware. Likely culprits include network cards, wireless cards, other non-standard hardware, HPET, badly written drivers, and the list goes on.

Hi all,

Thanks for your comments. I have tried to respond to them below.

evansmalley, Yes I have tried disabling drivers and unplugging and disabling the lan.
Beagle, no I do not have a tv tuner or wireless nic

wintaper, DPClait reports the latency at over 2000us until I load LatencyMon. Then both report the DPC latency to drop to < 100us. closing LatencyMon results in DPC latency climbing back up to>2000us.

The audio driver I am using is the M-audio driver for the sound card. I have also tried ASIO4All, and the AMD drivers (the last in desperation). 

johnnyV, I have searched many of these posts for a solution to DPC latency but not yet found one (very few even mention DPC latency as an issue). There are many posts saying Vista is no good for audio and I have also found posts with issues about the AMD drivers.

All, One point with LatencyMon it seems to use a lot of processor on cpu 0 measured using Process Explorer, but this doesn't seem to cause a problem!?

Finally my reason for posting this is to see if anyone has come across this issue and could recommend another way to analysing the problem and hence a solution (not just turning off drivers, or a minimum configuration boot which I have tried countless times).

Having said that many thanks for your input. johnnyV, can you let me know if you find any issues with LatencyMon, please?

Many thanks to all

RogerL_UK

Hi johnnyV

That's steady red, but it disappears when I run LatencyMon, but returns to 2000us when I stop LatencyMon!

I have no idea as to how to confirm the accuracy of DPClait. I only found it in an article in computer Music magazine, some time ago.

Nor do I know how to confirm the accuracy of LatencyMon, but both meters report latency in the same order of magnitude when I run them together. I have put down differences in absolute values to sampling intervals, but the differences are relatively small.

In the short term I will run LatencyMon when using Sonar.
 

Well read this so I downloaded the other latency Mon but it's buggy and just shows an error message when I try to run it, I don't have any patients with buggy free downloads so I will give it a miss. It is only a trial version anyhow.
Are you running both meters at the same time??
So what I read is the DPCLAT meter is in the red when run by it self? correct?
But when you run the other meter the red goes away??
If you run the DPCLAT meter and it's in the red you need to see whats causing it.

Thanks Bit, So saying that,  should the OP trust it's reporting or stick with good ol' DPCLAT?

open task manager and close things which are not 'system' run one by one as you watch the DPC Latency checker to see which program causes it to return to normal.  of course you'll have to remember which one does.  also, doing this may crash your system depending on which programs you remove, so it may take a lot of trial and error and rebooting to find something.

Thanks Beagle, I'll try that

Rogerl_UK

i have a problem like this running sonar 7 pe. it only happens when i have a lot of tracks. i'll play the music and it will start crackling so i stop and play again it stops. i beleive my problem is my video card because when the musics playing and i move my window up and down it crackles. i recently recorded a whole band for 9 hours straight and was worried this would happen but it didnt. i was also only using one monitor during this, rather than my dual monitor setup

Resplendence


LatencyMon is not buggy. We do just do not wish to accommodate those kind of idiots who do not wish to take the effort to read the requirements before running the software they download. The executable is statically linked against libraries that require Vista or greater, we do not wish to bloat the package with a separate executable to check the current running OS. Also the installer does not check the OS for a reason, that is that it is still possible to install the program and save it to a network location for use on other systems later. And no, this software is not written by a student between sessions but by a highly skilled and seasoned Windows kernel engineer. A lot of serious engineering went in this software and there is a good reason why this software is unique in its kind.

wow.  a little defensive AND "offensive" aren't we?  someone says something you didn't like about your product so you create a forum ID just to call them an idiot?  I'll be knocking down your door to give you MY money soon.  wait for it.

Ya, well oh well,,,,

Real-time audio suitability checker
for Windows 7/Vista/2008 (x86 and x64) 

sorry I missed the small print!  

But " how to win Friends and support on the internet" aside, What happened to the OP?
I agree Beagle, I would have tried the software on my daughters Vista Laptop but now I would never recommend it. Makes me wonder how Dan found this thread? I guess if you google you company name?? No way the OP was just spamming this forum.