Returning player from 1.4 (Windows). Now installed 1.5.6 unfortunately also ran into this audio issue with you guys bunch. So far I only figured a temporary fix is go into the Tunnel area next to the Bus Stop to stop some audio tracks from playing, exiting the Tunnel and the new audio plays with no crackling but will not last forever. Also while the audio is crackling and lucky enough ran into nearby birds flying away chirping will also fix it temporary.
I have no yet tried the sword defense sound effect (as just discovered this thread), but if it
can fix the crackling then this
presumably has something to do with the audio logic side of things e.g. buffer/timing/channels in the coding? Or even the problematic HPET issue some computers has.
Too bad couldn't test the HPET theory on my PC because there isn't an option to disable it in BIOS. But the least I could try is use a different audio device other than the built-in audio on the mainboard to see if that changes anything. Is gonna take me days of thorough tests to report back.
Side note; audio crackling can also get from bad to worst that will sometimes cause game freezes like 1-5 frame per 10 seconds, essentially broken the game until run into something that play a random sound effect to fix itself back to normal.
-- EDIT --
Switching to external audio device didn't help, it was never audio device issue to begin with but game's code:
In my controlled experiment game is locked to use only CPU affinity 2 (CPU2) for single-threaded monitor, speed 1.6GHz, no TurboBoost.
Game initially run great and use average 2.3% out of 12.5% on CPU2 (12.5 is the max speed per thread on 8 threads CPU), lasting approximate 20 seconds CPU2 suddenly raising usage to the max and game drop to like 0.5fps near lock up state. Enabling TurboBoost gain up to 2.8GHz and game responds again. RAM & GPU are still in the nominal lows but CPU2 is still in the max and there are minor game stutter goes with audio crackling time to time.
You may think is the lack of CPU speed, but Right-click on the sword plays a 'flap' sound effect the same from the birds in Springs season, both can clear high CPU usage and return game to normal. This is clearly game code or .NET acting up, really curious what this 'flap' sfx is tied to in the code that able to clear unnessesary utilizations and why doesn't anything else do this.
Doesn't matter high or low PC specs, vanilla SDV can run steadily even on an 13 year old CPU at 1GHz as tested but this bug really hit the bad spot, I believe some players might even be maxing their CPU without knowing just so the game runs.
This graph is the cut out of CPU2 usage, not the entire CPU combined
