Crackling Creative X-Fi sound cards

According to the manufacturer's official announcement, members of the X-Fi sound card family can produce crackling, bouncing, distorted sound on motherboards based on the nForce4 chipset.

Despite user feedback, Creative has not yet updated the latest driver package for X-Fi sound cards, released on November 2005, 15, as the company's experts have reportedly only now managed to reproduce the error phenomenon mentioned in the introduction.

The manufacturer, however, shirks responsibility, and Creative says the source of the problem is not to be found in the device driver or in the sound card. According to the company, the crackling, bouncing, distorted sound is a fault of the memory subsystem, and this assertion is further reinforced by the fact that the fault only occurs on motherboards based on nForce4 chipsets.

The problem may be that the sound card does not have enough access to the system memory, so the data is not received by the signal processor in time, the sound buffer is emptied, and as a result, the continuous sound may be interrupted for a very short time.

Creative experts recommend that you update the motherboard BIOS or use a dual-channel memory subsystem to resolve the issue. Of course, these solutions may not always help, but the world’s largest sound card manufacturer promises to have the official repair completed within weeks.