Sound problem in Skyrim (crackling) : V

» Sun Mar 24, 2013 8:40 pm

Hi guys. I'm having a really annoying problem with Skyrim. Whenever I play using headphones, after a while I get some crackling sounds, kind of like a white noise. Severity varies - sometimes it's a crack or two and it stops and sometimes it sounds like it's blowing up my headphones and it cuts off whole sound. Sometimes restarting the game helps, but sometimes I need to mess around, i.e. change my sound card mode (more on this later) or even restart my PC... When I play using speakers it also happens but not as often and I seem to be able to play longer before it happens.

I have Sound Blaster Fatal1ty Platinum sound card and Creative 2.1 speaker set.

For headphones it's usually about 30-40 minutes of gameplay and on speakers it's much longer, sometimes it does not happen at all.

My sound card has 3 modes - Entertainment, Gaming and Audio Creation. After turning the game off, the crackling sound doesn't stop, I need to the card's mode - this seems to "reset" the sound and the crackling stops. Although, as mentioned - sometimes it comes back straight away when I switch the mode back to gaming and then the only solution is to restart my PC.

I read somewhere that Sound Blaster cards haven't got the best compatibility with Skyrim and that lowering the sound quality helps, so I tried lowering it from 24-bit 48000Hz to 16-bit 24000 Hz, but that doesn't seem to help at all.

It's driving me nuts, I've spent long long time sorting out my Skyrim installation (STEP + SkyRe + many other mods) and when I'm finally able to play I get this!

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

P.S.

All my drivers are updated, I have Windows 7 Home. My system: AMD Phenom 2 6-core 3.2 GHz, ASUS GeForce GTX660 2GB VRAM, 4 GB system RAM.