Sound crackling and stuttering randomly

[BananaGore]

Sometimes during certain songs (when playing with Yuffie) or randomly when going from one section to the other. It can also happen during combos or hit sound effects. It becomes very annoying.

So far the only way to minimize the problem (not fully resolve it) is to play on headphones connected to the controller. Laptop audio or when using wired headphones connected have big sound crackling issues.

Tried lowering/going up the Mhz/bit, disabling/enabling spatial sound/audio enhancement but nothing seems to fix the issue.

Also tried to lower in-game sound, change upscaler and other settings... nothing seems to work. All drivers are up to date. Windows 11, RTX 4070 laptop, core ultra 9 CPU.

[MisterEdd]

I had issues with sound dropping out randomly in a few games previously. It actually ended up being that an xbox controller was randomly trying to take control and be the main sound device. I literally found the driver and uninstalled it however disabling would also likely work. This seems pretty likely in your case as you mentioned using the controller as a sound device. If it's not this then try running latencymon. This will tell you if you have some driver or system process with a high enough DPC latency to cause pops or crackles in real time audio. Also just generally good to optimize your pc until it's low as your frametimes will be more consistent and you will have much less frequent issues with latency sensitive crashing/stalling.

[BananaGore]

Hey thanks for the tips. Swapping to a PS5 controller did help minimize the crackling, however the problem is the SFX setting in-game. With that turned to 0 there are no more sound issues... but also no sound effects :(

I ran the program you mentioned (Latencymon) and changed my power profile which did help a lot (so far haven't noticed any sound crackling with the changes to power profile + PS5 controller).

Cheers again!

Update: crackling still appears :(

The SFX option is just bugged at this point. Tried multiple headphones (wired & via Bluetooth). At this point hoping a patch will resolve the issue.