ratfink wrote:

In my windows 7 box i have a xonar sound card with headphone amp. I use it with some Phillips headphones. […]
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In my windows 7 box i have a xonar sound card with headphone amp. I use it with some Phillips headphones.

Normally it is great but the other day in WoW the sound degenerated into crackling for a while.

My previous box [completely different mobo, vga, cpu, ram] used to do this - i had assumed it was some problem with onboard sound.

Any ideas?

Make sure you rule out your headphones first. I was running into sound problems and couldn't figure out whas was going on, then one day while taking my headphones off I had touched the wire for one of the speakers in just the right spot for it to feel wrong. I took a look and the cable was indeed separating from the speaker plug. x_x;

Got a replacement cable and everything's been fine since. :)

Beyond that, crackling problems are usually related to outdated drivers, so make sure you update your audio drivers. If that doesn't solve them, the other possibilities I can think of are device conflicts, interference from other electronics, or heck, the audio device itself may have a bad capacitor or something. That's what took out my last LCD monitor. :P

Check the card for bad caps, time to time now days they often use low grade caps to cut corners.