e6500 crackling audio

Hi there John !.

The external speakers don't have any power supply, they just plug to the line-out jack, they are from an old compaq computer but even with no power supply they provide good sound .

I even tested my E6400 without the external speakers and with low volume and still the crackling is present.

I noticed that when the crackling occurs, seems like the laptop got frozen for a second (If i was moving the mouse it freezes and then continues, If I'm typing anything, the typing interrupts and then continues to appear what was entered in that second)

It's very weird since I've followed all the possible solutions in this and on other posts, even my BIOS is the latest (A15)!

Man, I can't believe that my old Latitude D620 has better audio performance that this E6400 ! and is weird that for almost all users, the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager released by Dell fixed the problem !!! (and not in my case )

Also for the record, I also intend to use my E6400 for my mobile DJ hobby, In my old D620 Y used Traktor 3.3.4 and Traktor pro 1.2 among my PCMCIA card Echo Indigo DJ, without any glitch or audio issue.

But on my E6400 also I have audio issues using the Echo Indigo DJ PCMCIA Card with the same settings as my old D620

I'm considering making another test with a spare E6400 we have, with the same exact Hardware as my E6400, But now I will select SATA mode to ATA, Reinstall windows XP SP3, reinstall the latest dell drivers, I have read that by doing so you loose the eSata functionality and perhaps the HDD performance will be less that ACHI or IRRT, but will make the test and see what happens, since the test I did with ACHI mode also resulted in audio crackling

BTW, is there any E6400 or E6500 user that still has those audio issues?

Thanks John & My best regards
Hector

 

Hi there.

Just to inform you that as a last resort, I changed the SATA mode from IRRT to ATA, after doing that the BIOS displayed a warning that perhaps I need to reinstall my OS... well, I decided to take the risk... I saved the changes, restarted my E6400 and windows XP SP3 loaded without any issue

Well, then I wen to make some test, like opening several programs while playing my mp3s on Winmap, and there was no Audio Skip ! nor crackling !

I used HD Speed to meause the performance of my internal HDD and its the same as it was on IRRT (about 85 MB/s average)

That¿s great !!! the audio issue is gone !!! so this makes me wonder that the hardware is OK and that perhaps the IRRT and AHCI SATA modes are broken (maybe from the BIOS or perhaps the drivers).

I've read that operatin in ATA mode disables the eSata Port, well, at this time I'm not using that eSata port, so for me, this is a fix to the issue !!

I've already reported that to Dell and hope they resolve DEFINITELY this issue soon, for what I've read in this forum and several others, the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager version resolved the audio issue for SOME computers, not all.

But the ATA mode solves the issue for those computers that even with the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager were still having audio issues.

I hope this helps other users

 

I haven't checked in here for quite some time, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I updated to Windows 7 Professional and so far I have no skipping problem anymore. It's been about 4 days now. I did do a completely clean install and I did not load ANYTHING from the Dell website except the video driver. Well, I did download the sound card driver, but immediately uninstalled it once I discovered that they still haven't figured out how to make it sound better than the tiny speaker in my cell phone...lol! The driver that Windows installs is basic, but it sounds decent.

When I was on Vista I tried every trick known to man and could never get it taken care of. And each time I would download a supposed fix from Dell it would get worse. I ain't downloading nuth'n else from them!