Spotify Audio Issues: Crackling and Popping when playing songs.

[tehx]

Hi. I have had this issue for a long time now, and I haven't been able to fix it no matter what I have tried; so I hope someone can help me. I am getting really bad quality audio on spotify on my desktop pc only (works fine on my laptop & phone)  - I just get random audio popping and crackling in the middle of songs at random times which is really annoying - this doesn't happen on any other streaming services such as youtube. It sometimes seems to fix itself after a restart or if I change some audio settings, but it always comes back. I tried troubleshooting the issue by reinstalling spotify, reinstalling audio drivers, using the microsoft audio drivers instead of realtek, updating the bios, using manual download of spotify instead of the windows store version, using a older version of spotify, using a different account for spotify, toggling the 'high quality' streaming mode, using different speakers, changing bitrate to CD Quality, clearing cache, enabling/disabling hardware acceleration, disabling 'normalize volume' ,plugging speakers into front audio jack and so on, but none of them work.

 

One did try though is using a usb sound card and plugging my headphones into the card - there was no crackling. This really confuses me. If it doesn't happen when using a cheap sound card there must be something wrong with my PC audio? But then again, the audio is fine on other applications. So maybe there is some kind of compatibility issue with my pc intergrated audio and spotify? I just don't know and this is what I need help with. As I said, the crackling doesn't happen all the time, sometimes the audio is flawless, but sometimes out of nowhere the audio starts to crackle really loudly and I don't want to have to use my sound card because the audio isn't as good apart from there being no crackling. So I hope someone can help me fix this issue and if you need anymore info about my issue please ask. 

Thanks.

 

UPDATE: I tried opening the volume mixer by right clicking the speaker icon on the taskbar and when I have the volume mixer window open, the crackling is completly gone. Very strange. I hope someone can shed some light onto this.

 

My PC specs:

i7 7700k

strix gtx 1080ti

asus strix z270f mobo (supreme fx audio)

realtek audio drivers (downloaded from asus website)

 

Spotify version: 1.0.82.454.g623fabd2 (Windows Store version)