New Acer Aspire laptop.

[DrNomis_44]

Looks like you have narrowed it down to the laptop, so I'd be looking at when your USB / ASIO drivers were last updated and see if you can roll them back.

I'm guessing that you are using the headphone jack or line out on the Focusrite as the output to your sound system, what is the quality like when using the headphone jack of your laptop to provide the feed.

Try it with the 2i2 both connected and disconnected, if the sound is good then there is a problem in the USB area only, if it goes bad with the 2i2 connected then it looks like an A/D issue to me

Yep, during all the testing/troubleshooting, I either had my Audio Technica headphones plugged directly into the headphone socket on the front-panel of the 2i2, headphone out volume was at half-way, or my two 15 Watt Audioline powered monitors were plugged into the line-outs on the back-panel of the 2i2, in both cases the audio was crackly and distorted, I noticed that while playing back one of the demo songs in FL Studio 20, sometimes the audio was only slightly crackly and distorted, other times the crackle and distortion was very obvious, changing the ASIO buffer setting and sample-rate made no difference, I would try rolling-back the driver, but since I've done a complete re-format of the laptop's system SSD drive, and clean install of Windows 10, I can't do that, I tried installing the earliest driver I had but that made no difference.


One thing I did notice is that when I disconnected the 2i2 from the laptop and plugged the headphones directly into the laptop's headphone socket, I could get windows system sounds and youtube audio to playback clearly, when playing back audio from FL Studio 20, I had to use the FL Studio ASIO that came with FL Studio 20, I could get audio to play back cleanly with the headphones plugged into the laptop, if I set FL Studio ASIO to about 60ms, but that caused FL Studio 20 to run a bit sluggishly.


Could it be that the 2i2 drivers that Focusrite provide don't work too well with my laptop, and I'm a bit unlucky to find that out the hard way?