I've been dealing with an audio problem for several months. When I record clips with different programs or stream something so other people can hear it, the audio starts cutting out in tiny fragments and gradually gets worse until it suddenly recovers. There doesn't seem to be a fixed interval, but it happens consistently. I can hear audio normally through my Astro A50 headset; the issue only affects recordings, clips, and shared audio.
It originally happened in OBS, where I managed to reduce it by using Voicemeeter, but the problem still occurs in other capture software and when sharing audio through Discord. I've already flashed the BIOS, updated the audio drivers and headset firmware, reconnected everything, and tested different USB ports. My motherboard is a Gigabyte B650 AORUS ELITE AX V2, and Windows is set to 24-bit, 48 kHz, two-channel audio. Could this be caused by DPC latency, USB power management, BIOS settings, or something else?
2 Answers
You can also test power-management and firmware-related causes. In Windows, make sure USB selective suspend is disabled and PCIe Link State Power Management is turned off. In the BIOS, temporarily disabling Global C-State Control may help identify whether power-state transitions are involved; leave CPPC enabled or set to Auto. Since the headset uses a charging base, testing every USB port is still worthwhile, preferably a rear motherboard port rather than a front-panel connection.
This sounds more like a system latency or driver issue affecting captured audio than a problem with the headset speakers themselves. A DPC latency checker such as WTool can show whether a driver is causing temporary processing stalls. Let it run while the problem occurs and watch for unusually high latency or a driver entry being highlighted. Common causes include network, GPU, chipset, and audio drivers.
I installed the tool, but I’m not sure how to interpret it. Something turned yellow while I was testing—does that point to the driver causing the problem?
USB selective suspend and PCIe power management were already disabled, and I’ve tried the headset base in multiple ports. I’ll test the BIOS C-State setting, although the headset itself plays normally and only the captured or shared audio breaks up.