Hello there!
As title goes, I am slowly but steadily losing my mind trying to fix or even analyze this. Stressed out, bad sleep, losing weight, this is just insane. I'll try to explain the order in which things happened.
Initially, I just had to power off and disassemble my PC to install the new SSD, and I then connected everything back. While proceeding through the installation of all my usual stuff, I also installed RDR2 which I played a lot, and launched it a couple of times. I immediately noticed some slight audio crackling and popping; but that was normal, I thought. That game is plagued with sound issues, and you can find many cases in google. Heck, even I myself had these issues before reinstalling, and they got fixed by turning off the 'exclusive' checkboxes in the audio device properties.
Not this time, though. I didn't help at all. I've tried many things. Checking DPC latency, trying different drivers, trying different solutions...
But then I thought: could it be that it's my 2.1 system dying? So I launched RDR2 on PS4. And guess what? The crackles were there too! The system is still on warranty, so 'hooray!', I thought. But not for long. Because I realized I should probably check 'just in case' that these issues aren't present with my headphones. Turned out, they WERE present. They were present with all audio output devices I tried, including the USB ones. They were present on both PS4 and PC, and regardless of whether I used the PCI-E card, the MB Realtek sound or even the monitor DP sound.
But then it dawned on me: could it be that something just broke with the recent RDR2 patch, so it's like that on both systems? Would be convenient if it was this way, huh? Sadly, it wasn't. I installed GTAV and noticed the same thing happening there, too. Exhausted, I was watching some random Youtube videos and heard those things there, too.
I then tried reading up on electricity, ground loops, but didn't understand that much, sadly. I am losing my mind here.
This is an example of how it sounds: https://youtu.be/fWy3OpfwaFQ?t=60
Starting at 1:00, you can clearly hear those things at ~1:02, ~1:16 and also some other timestamps during the second half of the video.
And help would be much appreciated.
