Rare, random audio stutter/distortion/crackle

[hoobadooba]

I've noticed this issue come up about a month or so ago. I've noticed it only while watching YouTube so far, and it's very rare, and I can't seem to reliably recreate it. It doesn't seem like it should be related to any updates or anything as I haven't touched a thing as far as I know. Sometimes the audio of a video will randomly stutter; kinda sounds like interference or some kind of lag like the video loaded corrupted. If I immediately replay that portion of the video, it doesn't happen again, so I can't really pinpoint it. Is this something other people experience or something I should be worried about in a hardware issue?

 

My specs are:

 

Asus z270-a (bios version 1009 I believe)

Corsair vengeance lpx ddr4 8x2gb

Evga supernova g3 750w

GTX 1070ti

i7 7700k

 

Win10 home 64 bit

 

I replaced my ram the other day, but I noticed this sound anomaly on the old kit as well. In my experience this sort of rarity doesn't just happen for no reason and usually indicates a problem... I'm just worried and not sure what it could be. Any ideas? Is it normal?

[RobbinM]

21 minutes ago, hoobadooba said:

only while watching YouTube

Try switching browsers

[hoobadooba]

Okay.. I noticed this while watching a video elsewhere as well. This time, I was also doing something else with it playing to the side and noticed my mouse cursor also skipped/stutered while I was moving it. I could really use some insight on this; I've never seen anything like it before. It's troubling.

 

Seems like I only noticed it the past couple months; nothing else seems unusual. Could it be related to a driver or something or recent Windows updates? I know there was another patch for spectre/meltdown that probably affected cpus again... Hardware? I haven't the slightest.

[hoobadooba]

On 9/13/2018 at 7:06 PM, RobbinM said:

Try switching browsers

Hey, an update on this!

 

This was originally hard to test at first, as the issue was so infrequent, however I noticed today, by listening to the same track on my phone and on my PC. This particular track always had a bit of subtle audio clipping/static nothing like what I was describing here, but because it didn't happen on my phone and because it persisted on my PC even after refreshing, it got me curious. Now I had a way to compare it to other browsers, where it didn't happen. Turning off hardware acceleration in firefox seems to have fixed this, and perhaps that was the source of my other issue. If not, perhaps it lets me know something is up with the gpu in the future.

[hoobadooba]

Alright, so I had it happen again in my browser with hardware acceleration off. My bios and drivers are all up to date now as well, which I thought might have fixed it as I hadn't seen the stutter happen in a long time.

 

I notice this only happens when I watch videos in my browser, but it seems odd that the whole computer would stutter a bit. I get the audio sounding robotic/buzzing and what seems like a skip on everything else visual, like a system-wide micro-freeze. Anyone have any ideas on this at all? It started in August so it makes me wonder if that round of Windows updates might have done something. If not that, I think the GPU, since I also get this rare flicker sometimes (that started in newer drivers, too) if I use my browser with hardware acceleration on. If not that, I thought maybe something wrong with my Malwarebytes installation/real-time scanning after an update. Maybe it's just the browser itself but... that seems fishy to me.

 

I'm so at a loss for this. This whole old thread is the only similar issue I've found: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/304587-33-video-audio-stuttering-issues#r7029322

 

Any help would be so greatly appreciated.