Getting Crackling Audio with Network Traffic in Dell XPS 15z

[Hiryuru]

I brought dell xps 15z one month ago,following is my configuration

• intel i7
• 8GB RAM
• 750 GB Hard drive

When there is considerable network traffic any audio playback becomes crackling and distorted.Dell has been superior enough to replace the machine with a brand new one after I reverted to a complete factory image and the difficulty was still there.

[Samaria]

All sandy bridge models have Crackling Audio troubles. You can attempt copy 8G data from C: to external driver or what, then until attempt to play music, has a same troubles. I already protest much time.

[sHaRiCe]

Do you have any additional detail on this? Who says it's normal? This machine is using Realtek High Definition Audio
although.

Copying to/from a USB stick (about 25MB/sec) and to/from a USB external drive (about 85MB/sec) unable to demonstrate the trouble at all.

[Anjan1990]

Using DPC Latency regulator illustrate huge latency spikes when Wifi network traffic is happening which leads to audio troubles.dont know when apple will address this trouble.

[Mahalingam]

Now Dell desires to replace the Intel card with a Dell one. Not so eager on that to be truthful. I'll bet they rock up with some crap old model with less recital or without Bluetooth or something like that.

[HamsiniI]

I'll be capable to observe the Wifi card model in Device Manager if it's changed considerably. They are proposing replacing it with a "Dell" card however won't tell me what exactly that is yet. I actually don’t know how that's going to be probable since there is only one alternative for this laptop whereas I know some of the others you can choose Dell/Intel/Broadcom etc.

[IkshuL]

Do you know what he might be referring? Dell seem does not have any thought and astonishingly no one else is confirming my trouble even though I can replicate it on a brand new out of the box machine (x2) with no driver transform, installed software or anything

[The Picture]

What sort of throughput are you getting with file transfers? absolutely the higher the transfer rate, the worse the trouble gets. What sort of access point do you have?

[Mia!]

I've done a lot of transfer over my local network particularly in view of the fact that I have one of my Externals connected to my router; I'm using a netgear wndr3400. It might the difference in processor as I now notice ours is dissimilar, nevertheless I don’t know what the connection might be. Perhaps it has something to do with power draw

[JoanaJhon]

You can hear the crisis on any playing sound when significant network traffic occurs like copying a large file. Glitches/scratches in the sound as if the raw data is being sent to the audio card are being tainted. So it only occurs on
sound actually playing however it would make sense since every audio producing program suffers from it. The glitches don't occur if nothing is being played though.

Gaming or other CPU rigorous tasks aren't needed to make it happen. Just network demanding.

[TamaraAce]

I've more than halved my wireless network throughput. I'm not going to believe this from Dell. I want them to fix the hardware I bought rather than replace it with inferior hardware with less functionality.

It's fairly obvious; it was the network card/driver. They even sent a new-fangled motherboard as well. No point in that since I still have two complete machines that both have the trouble i.e. it's not a physical hardware mistake.

[iAMjason]

I too have the same problem with my 15z. To show that network traffic causes the latency spikes over WiFi, I would let a 1080p YouTube video buffer and monitor my computer using DPC Latency Checker. As a result, I have found that I get HUGE latency spikes (sometimes over 16,000 nanoseconds). To help offer a solution, I have been posting in in this forum trying to figure out the problem:

If you read the posts on the above forum, you'll see that replacing the WiFi card (Centrino N6230) won't do anything; nor will reverting back to a factory image. I have been in contact with a Dell rep who offered to have the Centrino card replaced with an identical one, though, I doubt this will correct this issue. One person in the above forum has said that this is NOT A HARDWARE ISSUE because he could reproduce the problem on 2 different brand new 15z. Similarly, IkshuL from this forum said:

no one else is confirming my trouble even though I can replicate it on a brand new out of the box machine (x2) with no driver transform, installed software or anything

At this point, I am think that this is most likely a DESIGN problem. I even performed the same test on a different 15z, with SLIGHTLY lower specs that did not have the crackling audio but found that the computer still had latency spikes.

**One thing I will say is that the latency spikes/crackling audio only occurs when I'm connected on a wireless-N network. I am currently on a wireless-G network and PERFORMED THE SAME TEST WITH THE SAME DRIVERS, but don't get any problems.**

I have tried EVERY workaround to this problem, which I have listed at the end of this post. You are welcome to these workarounds but they, unfortunately, haven't fixed this issue for me:

• Disable the ethernet card via device manager
• Reinstalling the Realtek drivers
• Disable all sound effects from Realtek Audio
• Building the PC from scratch
• Downloading the XPS 15 drivers for the Centrino 6230 card