Crackling music

[rofoun]

Hello, I'm experiencing quite a weird issue with crackling in music playback.

My setup: HP EliteBook 860 G9, i5-1240p, 16GB RAM (2x8GB), clean installation of Windows 11. The laptop is only a month old.

What's the issue: When I play music, the sound has a lot of artifacts and crackling. Some sources are worse (mp3 and wav files in Foobar2000 and VLC, Spotify), some sources are better (YouTube, Windows Media Player, VLC on vide files), but I wouldn't say the issue is very much limited to some area. It doesn't make any difference if the output is speakers, headphones connected via jack or BT headphones.

After some googling I installed LatencyMon and indeed, latencies are terrible:

What I tried: Everything I could think of and google. All devices are recognized and drivers installed, all drivers are up to date, BIOS is up to date, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Realtek drivers, I tried to do the same with every device which looks like it has something to do with sound. I ended up reinstalling Windows but with no change.

The current state is that the laptop is virtually unusable for listening to music, which kind of sucks. Unfortunately I found out too late and can't return it anymore (which I would have done). Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm really lost with this one.

(Edit: I simplified the description)

[banhien]

@rofoun 

Please perform a clean install Audio software/driver, this should help.

    (a) Download the following driver and save on your computer,
                             https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp143501-144000/sp143897.exe   (dated Dec 7, 2022 - last month)
    (b) Go to Device Manager, Sound to uninstall sound driver (Realtek) and reboot,
    (c) Right click downloaded file and select Run as administrator,
    (d) Reboot again.

Regards.

[rofoun]

@Banhien

Thank you, I tried it but it had no effect.

[rofoun · Accepted solution]

So it looks like I somehow managed to solve this issue by updating graphics drivers. I downloaded the latest Iris Xe drivers from Intel, which offers a newer version (31.0.101.4032) than HP  (31.0.101.3358). I also updated Wi-Fi and BT drivers via Intel Driver Support Assistant, which got installed with the graphics drivers. So in the end I don't really know, which one of the installed drivers was the important one, but the issue is resolved. Latencies are still not great, but at least they are not absolutely terrible anymore and I can play music without audio artifacts.

I just hope it will last at least for a while.