I have been hearing static noise and crackles, pops, etc through my headphones, even when not playing any audio. Moreover, when playing audio, the quality is often very bad. I improved the latter issue by updating the drivers, but it keeps reappearing, and the static noise issue always remained. I ran a latency monitor, and there indeed seem to be very high latency levels, bars running way up in the red, and thousands of milliseconds latency. The drivers listed as causing most latency were Wdf01000.sys, ACPI.sys, and HDAudBus.sys. I already tried the following:
- updating drivers and BIOS
- testing with other headphones
- disabling enhancements, and other standard audio fixes and automated troubleshooters
- set power settings to high performance
None of the above have worked so far. Many others also seem to be having this problem, specifically on HP laptops, but the last posts were already from a while ago, and I hope the issue has been fixed in the meantime. Judging from the many forum posts on this issue, it seems like it has appeared on HP products for years already, and no fixes seem to have taken place. I really like my laptop, it has good specs, and works well for gaming, but if this sound issue persists, I will definitely avoid HP products when buying my next PC, and discourage anyone thinking of doing so. Nobody wants to spend hours trying to troubleshoot the same issue without a clear fix in sight.