Random pop sounds

Ever since I don't remember, I've been getting the occasional "pop" through my speakers/headphones. Doesn't matter what I'm using, either the Aune or the onboard. It seems to happen with the CPU is changing power states, but even that isn't consistent. It's not a loud pop, but it does sound like temporary distortion. The easiest example I can give is the Windows UAC prompt. If a program brings that up, it's often accompanied by that pop, and the first few milliseconds of the audio sample seem to be distorted. Consistent audio streams like music through Foobar or Pandora aren't affected. Only some games are affected (Fallout New Vegas, where the distortion is almost rhythmic, and seems to come out of the right channel only). It's the strangest PC issue I've ever seen. I've tried lots of things, from replacing the power strip, disabling onboard, trying a different outlet, a different PSU, a different motherboard, reformatting, installing Windows 7, testing DPC latency (found a problem, corrected it, but no dice).



None of these issues happened on my old Z77 system. Not sure how a processor could cause this, but I can't think of anything else I've changed. I disabled C-States and that didn't help either. Maybe I'm just going insane? I tried the speakers on the Aune, the Headphones onboard, etc. Played around to no end. Can't think of anything else to try. Doubt anyone can help, but if anyone had a similar idea and fixed it, I'd like to know what you did.



Part of the issue is that everything else is flawless. No crashes or stability issues whatsoever. And now I'm not sure what's actually the problem manifesting itself, or bad audio samples that have always been there that I didn't notice before because I wasn't thinking I had a problem. :wanker:

Random pop sounds