Sound Blaster Audigy static crackling and popping

Well, I put in a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value edition I had lying around, and now I remember who I took it out and tossed it aside. It crackles and pops incessantly, whether or not anything is playing.

Back when I took it out, it was when I upgraded from WinXP to Vista (or was it Win2k to WinXP?) I dont even remember any more. But whichever it was, it was working fine before, and then cracking and popping after the software change.

Basically the drivers for the newer OS were broken or something.

When I went back to the older OS, it would work all right (good thing for multiple hard drives eh) But when your buy a new OS and want to USE it, some sacrifices had to be made.

Especially when you have an onboard sound card that works fine in either OS. Sure it isn't as high quality sound as the Sound Blaster, but the onboard sound was working while the SB sounded like a record player with a worn out needle.

Anyways, it happened long ago enough that I'd forgotten about it, since I could still get working audio even without fussing over an old SB sound card.

So, now that my onboard sound's jack is messed up, and the Soundblaster is still crackling and popping, I decided to poke around and see what other people have the problem, and perhaps find if there was ever a fix for it. Google search provided a ton of links when I searched for "Sound Blaster crackle crackling" showing it was an extremely common issue with the Audigy and X-Fi lineups.

As I understand it, Creative says that these cards can't handle the PCI buffer delays introduced by certain motherboards, making it a hardware issue. (what happens when you haven't changed any hardware like in my situation?) Even if it was a latency issue that is related to how the OS decides to allocate resources, you'd figure that the company would release fixed drivers, right? But there is a lot of conspiracy theory style talk about how Creative doesn't want to support these older products in order to sell it's newer products. Its a shame if that's true.

So, I found some alternative drivers that people say seem to eliminate the crackle problem, written or modded by Daniel Kawakami. They havent seemed to help me much but I had a hell of a time trying to get the newer official drivers uninstalled. Maybe something didn't work out. I'll try uninstalling and reinstalling the software again later - SB drivers take forever to install.

I did find a work-around late last night though. (or so I thought) I tried the Audigy's digital out port with my stereo jack-to-rca jack adapter, and found the R-audio could deliver digital audio that my stereo's co-axial audio would accept. With no static even! I was happy, why didn't I think of using digital audio to eliminate something that sounded like analog static? (well cause it always failed before) However that was short lived, as when I turned it on this morning, the crackle was back in all its glory, on a digital audio connection. I don't get it.

Maybe I should splice some jacks onto my Logitech USB audio headset's cable and split the sound to headphone and to the stereo. Then I could go office space on this stupid Sound Blaster and smash it.

Someone slap me if I ever buy Sound Blaster again.

Upsen.