audio popping - any solutions?

everything works on my machine, including audio, but it pops a lot during playback of anything. searched the forum and found only a few threads concerning audio popping and tried the proposed solutions including:

-changing smbios definition to both MacPro3.1 and IMac 12.2, 13.2
-changing bitrate in AudioMidi Setup to 16-bit

Neither solution worked. I even tried installing VoodooHDA. I had this same issue back when I had a different motherboard and was using OSX Snow Leopard. For that fix I had to enable SSE in VoodooHDA preferences. Tried to install Voodoo and do that, no help either


anyone have any solutions? tried MB to reinstall Realtek 887/88b - Without DSDT - v100302 Current. Again audio works, just constant popping


z77-ds3h
i5 3570k

pjfan281 said:

anyone have any solutions?

Click to expand...

See Audio Popping Solutions in Post #1, Mountain Lion: Optimized AppleHDA for Realtek ALC8xx

That post seems to deal with an audio pop after a period of no audio. My popping occurs constantly during playback, for example, when playing music or videos on YouTube

pjfan281 said:

That post seems to deal with an audio pop after a period of no audio. My popping occurs constantly during playback, for example, when playing music or videos on YouTube

Click to expand...

Your "popping" is not popping. It may be noise, usually, caused by an installation/grounding problem with the motherboard, case and/or connected devices.

well thanks for the response, but it definitely it popping. it's not a hiss or the noise you would hear when touching the tip of a stereo cable with your finger. in fact, even with the volume at fun blast no noise is heard at all. it's only when i syart to play a song that i hear the popping, every two seconds or so. i've rechecked all my wiring and everything else. as i said i had the same issue with a previous built. once i checked that little box for SSE in VoodooHDA it went away.

update: went ahead and reseatted the motherboard anyway, and redid all connections. problem still exists

update 2: reinstalled OSX, same issue. downloaded and install anti pop. no help. also tried to use the other ports on the back, each gave the same result.

something is screwing up the audio =\

Anything else I can do to help diagnose this toleda? Your help is greatly appreciated

There are a lot of threads about the popping.

It appears this started showing up in OS X 10.4.10, from what I've read. The cause is due to the Mac audio system performing a powering down of the audio amplifier (to reduce hiss, noise, whatever reason). So, after a few seconds of silence, the audio powers down. And, of course, the next time that an audio signal comes in ... the amp powers up. That is the pop.

Common solutions appear to be:

• Antipop (which I used to stop my GA-H77N-WIFI realtek 892 popping). This will install a daemon/service that has the Mac 'say' a <space> sound (like "say ' '") every 10 seconds. So, the power down of the amp cannot occur
• LineIn app from Rogue Amoeba. This is an app that will allow you to "pass through" audio from 1 physical port to another (e.g., mic input to audio output). So, choosing a "silent input" to pass-through to the audio output will stop the amp from powering down.
• Multibeast system definition macpro3,1 -- evidently setting your system def to macpro3,1 will prevent this. I assume its some apple thing (code? logic?) in the AppleHDA.kext

One item to check, I was having constant popping after getting the audio working on my GA-Z77N-WIFI HDMI port

Based on some other research, I checked out the audio midi setup, the default was set to 96K Hz format and 2 ch -24 bit integer.

As soon as I changed it to 48K, the popping popping stopped. Apparently my HDTV couldn't handle the higher bit rate.

*In case it's relevant, I was using a DVD as the audio source.

thanks for the replies guys.


@joej - tried all the above solutions. but didn't help. as I mentioned, my issue doesn't seem to be the typical "pop" i've read about in numerous other posts. those, as you mentioned, seemed to be caused by a period of inactivity and the amp powering down. my issue is a constant popping, throughout audio playback, not just it's initial start. just to be thorough, i tried antipop, multiple system definitions including 3.1, 12.1/2, 13.1/2, and even tried linein to no avail


@afmduke - tried changing to 48000 from 44100, and also tried 16-bit as opposed to 24 bit.


still no go =(

I'm in the exact same situation here (though with the z77-ds5h). Everything works fine under Linux and Windows, so it's not a hardware problem.