Audio popping issue

[Teiren]

So more interesting results, all with these settings: Listening Position 62, Party Effects-Limited, Others Effects-None, Object Quantity-Low.

I got zero audio stuttering at all in the first three floors of the new raid. Then in the fourth floor, I got the normal amount; changing Listening Position to 100 reduced its frequency greatly but did not eliminate it 100%, just like what happens in other duties that have stuttering. The stuttering in the fourth floor didn't seem to coincide with any special skills or events either. Hell, it happened even while the boss was only casting a simple raidwide attack with no special floor effects active or anything. Perhaps healers and others were casting several reduction abilities that I couldn't see because of Limited Party Effects, although you can still HEAR those effects, so I'm not sure if that setting is really doing anything, but it felt like it might have had an effect in Alliance Raids.

I really am at a loss here. It's like there's almost no consistency. It's crazy that it varies so much not only between people but for a single person as well.

[AeroXaia]

TL;DR if you havent cleaned your computer in years, try vacuuming the dust out, it might help?? There's definitely still an issue on their end because I get the occasional stutter but this alleviated like 90% of the instances

Dust can cause ton of heat (took me a while to learn this), and heat can cause thermal throttling (CPU slowing down to not overheat). Throttling seems to greatly affect this issue, more than it affects other things by far. Like you're saying, there's definitely something wrong, and while CPU throttling can slow everything down, it has a dramatically larger effect on the sound it seems - because something is wrong.

I really am at a loss here. It's like there's almost no consistency. It's crazy that it varies so much not only between people but for a single person as well.

Yeah, it's really inconsistent, and I think that's why there's so many times people think it's better and then it "breaks again" - because it was never better, it's just intermittent sometimes. It comes and goes seemingly randomly.

Turning the visuals for party and self effects had no effect for me when I was testing in the inn, where it was very, very consistent and I was taking the video in my bug report. I didn't get that part in the video, but I did play with it a lot. I have macros to adjust the effects in 4 different ways, 3 of which I normally use anyways, and one for turning even self effects off that I made just to test. Even with nothing visible, they had the same stuttering effect.

I did briefly show the object quantity, and I think just left it on minimum, just to show it really did nothing at all too. It might be different with different setups though, since a couple things people said worked did nothing for me.

It took more casts of Dyskrasia to break the sound (8), but it still broke. I've taken to logging out in the Rising Stones, just to make testing iterations easier.

Is that consistent? I mean, if you relog and do the same thing like 4-5 times, do you get the same results with the same settings? It seems like 7 or 8 might just be from randomness.

[NyteKitsune]

Running on an AMD FX 8350 8-core (4.0 gigs) also having the stuttering issue. As I mentioned before, I didn't have this issue until the 6.01 patch. Before the patch the only issue I had was what everyone else experienced at peak times.. Extremely long ques to log in. After the patch horrible stuttering in instances and in cutscenes. Someone in SE made a mistake somewhere.

[ShadowedStranger]

Running on an AMD FX 8350 8-core (4.0 gigs) also having the stuttering issue. As I mentioned before, I didn't have this issue until the 6.01 patch. Before the patch the only issue I had was what everyone else experienced at peak times.. Extremely long ques to log in. After the patch horrible stuttering in instances and in cutscenes. Someone in SE made a mistake somewhere.

Same core, but issues started with 6.0.

[Maeklos]

Is that consistent? I mean, if you relog and do the same thing like 4-5 times, do you get the same results with the same settings? It seems like 7 or 8 might just be from randomness.

Breaking the sound engine without tinkering with any settings is consistent (usually taking 2-3 casts to break it). So anything that pushes it that far back is an anomaly.

[Jizu]

I did an interesting experiment.

I went into the settings for my speakers. (Right-click speaker icon in the bottom right of Windows -> Sounds -> Playback -> Selected my speakers -> Properties)
The very last tab at the top of the properties window? Spatial Sound. I turned this on (and had to restart FF, because of course I did). When I got back in game, the sound was muted, muddy, and sounded "underwater". I normally play with FF's Master Sound at 30 and my PC sound at 40% (because my speakers get -loud-) With the Windows Spatial Sound turned on, I had to crank FF's Master Sound all the way up to 100% as well as crank my PC sound up to 70% just to get an equivalent sound level. (For comparison, before I fired FF up again, I unpaused the video I'd been watching on Hulu. The sound level was exactly the same *after* I turned on Spatial Audio as before, which indicates that the issue with spatial audio is in FF, not anywhere else.)

I went to the Rising Stones and fired off Dyskrasia. It definitely took more casts than normal (7-8 instead of 2-3) to break the sound engine. But it still broke.

What's perhaps most interesting to me is that Windows comes equipped with a Spatial Sound option that exactly mimics what people have said that the stupid third party plugin does: muted sound, muddy sound, underwater sound.

Funny that SE would push us to buy a plugin that Windows comes with for free, no? Especially if they both mess up audio in the exact same way.

I figured I'd try this, bcs I'm grasping at straws. I also tried the quadraphonic sound.
In world FATEs still triggered it BAD. Once it started I even the sound menue was broken for way longer than usual. I loaded into a Trial to see how it goes with other players in a smaller instance. Ended up with Shiva (Hard) and it happend a few times. Less than usual (maybe I'm just huffing copium) but still noticably annoying. Once I loaded back into the world it stuttered again. I wasn't in combat nor next to other players.

I've not been playing for the past week+ only logging in to test someones newst idea to fix it. Not only is it that much worse since 6.01 but I have the feeling it's getting worse everyday. (Whilst I felt in the time from 6.0 to 6.01 it got better everyday.)

[Baa]

Snipped the quote:

...increase the audio buffer (this may introduce slight audio delay but is highly preferable to crackling audio) or add option for number of audio channels into the sound options going forward....

Thank you for mentioning audio buffer. I recall having reduced my audio latency, and removing that (i.e. increasing latency back to default) fixed the popping/crackling problems for me. I don't play on Windows though, so I'm not sure how to check that on Windows in general.

[Maeklos]

Ended up with Shiva (Hard) and it happend a few times. Less than usual (maybe I'm just huffing copium) but still noticably annoying. Once I loaded back into the world it stuttered again. I wasn't in combat nor next to other players.

Shiva and other ARR trials do seem to be alright (I had Shiva myself last night with no problems), so long as you aren't playing a melee class. If you're playing a healer or caster and standing at the edge of the fight, you might notice that it doesn't shutter much (if at all). I think that's because ARR trials were basically just empty arenas with next to zero visual clutter, nothing that could cause positional audio issues. Which is why I think I've had zero problems in Shiva and Ifrit, but Tsukoyomi and other post-ARR trials I've had have broken from the outset.

Now, if you're playing a melee class with abilities firing off all around you, or playing in a later trial, then the problem explodes.

[Vimak-Areseia]

Indeed, the Phenom-series CPUs are unaffected. My wife runs a 12 year old Phenom II X4, stock settings and hasn’t had any trouble with the update. Someone some pages back talked about the architecture of the FX series and how multiple cores share the same floating point modules causing cores to potentially be bottlenecked if the tasks (like spatial audio processing) relies too heavily on floating point math.

I’m assuming the Phenom II series doesn’t have that problem. Apparently a Phenom II can be put in an AM3+ socket, so I’m tempted to pick up a Phenom II X4 or X6 and “downgrade” my CPU to work around this.

Something FX 8XXX series people might try is using motherboard settings to turn off half the cores. I tried this with my FX 4100, and while it seemed to smooth out the sound a bit, I had nowhere near enough remaining CPU bandwidth to actually run the game above single digit FPS (in fact, sometimes the sound would stutter, but the cpu was maxed at 100% at 0 FPS, meaning that 2 cores isn’t enough for the sound alone). The idea is by taking half the cores offline, the remaining cores get exclusive access to the floating point modules so that the overall pipeline no longer gets backlogged trying to schedule floating point tasks with CPU cores that are idling due to the floating point modules being maxed out.

If spatial audio with such complex processing is the future of gaming, perhaps we need advances to offload these computations to the GPU, or perhaps make some sort of audio processing module that can handle these kinds of tasks (think beefed up sound card).

Don't make blanket statements like this! One post above yours I detail how I happened to get this bug ever since 6.01 came out, and guess what... I have a AMD Phenom II X6.

[Vyriun]

Hey everyone, wanted to chime in with my experience although it is different than what a lot of you outlined, I wanted to post my fix just in case there are others that happen to be in my position as well. So I was experiencing similar audio (and sometimes visual) stuttering that a lot of people have outlined since Endwalker released. I tried lowering all settings, exiting all processes, switching the audio channel, etc etc. Nothing was working (except switching to DX9 did help a little, but not completely) until finally I found that switching the Power Plan of my desktop helped. (Can be searched via Power Options > Additional Power Options). It was originally on "Performance" and switching it to "Balance" fixed all of my issues for me.

Keep in mind, mine is probably more of a very specific case where it was on my end, and doesn't have anything to do with the sound bug that has been confirmed, but it has been reported that Windows 10 has an issue with these power plans and bottlenecking applications.