Help in troubleshooting popping/crackling noise issue

[Marcus Aseth]

I have a pair of active monitors connected to an interface, connected to a PC running Windows 11, and these are some facts I've noticed about them:

・ when using RCA cables I have an "interference noise" coming from the speakers even at 0 volume, when my computer's GPU is under load.

・ that interference noise matches the refresh rate of the screen. the noise from a game running at 30Hz is very distinct from 60 or 140Hz.

・ when using XLR cables, there is no "interference noise".

・ but despite me using RCA or XLR cables, in both cases I have a different type of noise, an occasional intermittent popping/crackling sound, even when the system is idle. I might be reading a post here on AV NIRVANA and they start popping for 5 seconds, then they go back silent.

・ the left monitor appears to pop more than the right monitor. I would say 75% popping left, 25% right.


What can we deduce from this? I can deduce I have two different issues, one is solved by using XLR cables (the "refresh rate depentent noise"), the other (the popping sound) is unlikely to be related to the cables... but can't say much more.
What do you guys think is the cause of that occasional popping sound?

 

[Marcus Aseth]

(ops, accidentally quoted myself, ignore this)

 

[Marcus Aseth]

Well, this is crazy.
It might have been a driver problem.

My current working theory is that when I updated from Windows 10 to Windows 11, it kept the UMC22 drivers I had installed, despite them not being fully supported by Windows 11.
Therefore some kind of "internal struggle" happened on Windows to determine which driver should be in control, or something on those lines, having as end result the occasional popping sound at the most random times.

And simply removing the drivers hadn't fixed either, in order to truly solve it I had to completely remove all cached drivers, hidden device instances, and registry entries so that Windows would truly forget the device and revert to the class-compliant USB Audio driver.
I've been running my PC for 1 hour now, so maybe is too soon to talk, but the fact they didn't popped once is EXTREMELY promising.

For anyone who's experiencing the same, you can get that procedure I've followed by prompting chatGPT like so:

On Windows 11, I installed an old vendor USB audio driver (Behringer UMC22), then uninstalled it, but Windows keeps binding the device to the vendor driver instead of the generic ‘USB Audio Codec’ (usbaudio2.sys).
How can I completely remove all cached drivers, hidden device instances, and registry entries so Windows forgets the device and reverts to the class-compliant USB Audio driver?

(oh and of course you might still need to install ASIO4ALL which is a download on the product page)

Hope this will find its way to help the next unlucky UMC22 user