I'm currently trying to get our usb soundcards to work again.

They crackle/pop at random times, just like a vinyl record.

I ran lots of tests, with latencymon and other software, but couldn't really find the problem. I installed all the latest drivers for the motherboard, gpu,.. Still no change.

I also bought some pcie usb 3 cards, and installed one in our pc. This to make sure the roothub of the soundcard would not be shared with any other device, like a mouse or a keyboard.

In latencymon I noticed lots of hard page faults, so I disabled the page file, which is no problem since i have 32gb RAM. Also I noticed the gtx 1080 driver causes some latency. Since it's the latest, I can't really change that. Same goes for the quad 2 from blackmagic. Both have high dpc values.

I set vmix's and FFMPEG's priority to realtime and prioritised all blackmagic and graphics card software as well.

This improved the latency in latencymon a bit, but still some of the peak values are way too high. When there are peaks, there are no dropped samples in vmix though.

Since it's a 10core, I doubt bandwidth is an issue, but still some peak values are so high latencymon says the system is not suitable for realtime audio.

When i look at the statistics in vmix, I see around 4-5 samples are dropped every hour. The crackles do not correspond with those sample drops however, since there's way more of them then there's samples lost.

All other statistics are stable too: 5- 8% cpu usage, no spikes. ram usage and the ssd usage is super stable as well.


I had to search for a long time, to find the sample/bitrate settings for the 2i2, and noticed they were on 44100 instead of 48000 hz, which is the standard setting of vmix.

I set the soundcard to 16 bit/48000 hz now, so it corresponds with vmix, but the crackles and pops remain. I also tried the other way around: vmix and soundcards on 44100, still no change.

The buffers of the 2i2 are set on the longest setting.

I have one clue left however:

When I look in vmix, in the audio settings of the soundcard, I notice it says 32 bit 48000 hz, a setting I cannot change.

Since the card can't do 32 bit, I wonder if this might cause the problem?