How to fix bad audio with clicking noises on Dell Latitude 14 5495

Submitted by eazrael on Mon, 10. Sep 2018 01:38:36

Issue

"Clicks" during during audio playback of music, videos or in games and even with the Windows notifications and during sound tests in the Realtek device settings, Windows mixer settings and in MaxxAudioPro. These clicks can be heard when using the internal speaker or with attached external devices like headphones.

Solution

Disable PCI Express Link State Power Management for your power plan. Right click on power/battery notifcation in the task bar, choose "Power Options", click on "Change Plan Settings" for the Dell power plan or for the power plan you are currently using, then click on "Change advanced power settings". Expand "PCI Express", expand "Link State Power Management" and set both to "Moderate Power Savings". I do not know how much battery runtime this costs you, so it's up to you whether you prefer good audio or longer battery time. But I doubt that the power consumption will go up noticably.

Kudos to "Francois Villemaire" who found the solution. No need to disable "USB selective suspend settings" or reboot. The settings will applied immediately when you press "Apply". Fun fact, pressing apply after changing the setting back to maximum may result in an distorted confirmation sound ;-)

Comment

Another evening wasted on analysing a problem of a new device instead on working on my own projects. This is really annyoing.. why can't a new device just simply work?

I tried updating/downgrading various drivers, changing the realtek driver to a generic audio driver, changed sample rate and bit depth for the device. As these clicking noises are typical for buffer underuns I looked for interrupt and DPC problems and after finding these I went on searching for the culprit causing high Interrupt and/or DPC latency, stopped a lot of services and so on. Unfortunately I did not find the cause, it was just suspicious that the longest ISR/DPCs took ~16,6ms (=> 1/60s). Learned more about Windows, so not all the time was wasted.