Personally, I've been wondering if using a separate sound card might help as well, if not simply a different motherboard entirely, as I'm noticing a fairly common factor seems to be realtek onboard audio/asus motherboards... trouble is, I don't really have any extra sound cards laying around to test that theory, and if it *is* the motherboard to blame instead... well, that's not really something you can easily swap out without having to reinstall the operating system :/