New Acer Aspire laptop.

[DrNomis_44]

Update:

Just for giggles, and cause I couldn't think of anything else to try, I decided to try doing a quick and dirty audio recording, using just my Fender USA Strat as a signal-source, no plugins, just plugged straight-into input 1 of my Scarlett 2i2, to see if the crackly distortion sound issue affected both recording and playback,.....well, audio seems to be recording cleanly, and it seems to play back cleanly too, it's just when I try playing-back any of the demo songs that come with FL Studio that the crackly distortion audio issue manifests itself....hmmm that's weird, that never used to happen before, it's only since about the 20th of last month (January 2020) that the audio issue has been manifesting itself.


Going to try installing the rest of my Daw software on my laptop and see if the crackly distortion sound issue manifests itself with them, if it does then, by logic, that suggests that it has something to do with something common to all my Daw software.

Just tried playing back one of the demo songs in Reason 10, audio seems to be playing back a little bit cleaner than FL Studio 20, still getting the occasional audio-pop, but it's not as bad as it was in FL Studio.


I'm wondering if it's my laptop's CPU, not having enough processing grunt, that's causing the issue, it should easily have enough processing grunt cause it's an 8th generation Quad-Core Intel i5-8265U 1.6Ghz with turbo-boost up to 3.9Ghz, it comes up in Device Manager as an 8-Core CPU cause each of it's four physical cores can handle two threads simultaneously.


Okay, just got Ableton Live 9 Standard re-installed on my laptop, audio seems to be playing-back cleanly, for each of the Daw tests I've done so far, I've set the sample-rate to 44,100kHz and buffer to 512.

So far the audio crackling/distortion issue seems to be the worst with FL Studio 20 Producer Edition, all the Daw software installations are brand-new clean installs on a clean install of Windows 10 64Bit, brand new clean installs of all the drivers and windows updates, and etc.


Seriously considering upgrading to a new Scarlett 2i2 3rd generation audio interface, my current 2i2 is a 2nd generation, the 3rd generation uses usb 3.1 connectivity and as it just so happens, my Acer laptop does feature a usb 3.1 port.

The Scarlett 2i2 2nd generation uses a usb 2.0 port, a usb 3.1 port has a much faster data-bandwidth than a usb 2.0 port, I think it's about 6Gb/sec for usb 3.1 versus 480Mb/sec for usb 2.0.