Audio popping issue

[hasuyaki]

I've been lurking this thread for a while and this is my first post on the forums so...apologies if I mess up something..

But after having no issues until 6.0, and no change for better or worse with 6.01, I wanted to provide a possible alleviation that happened for me (not a total solution, because I still get stutters maybe 5% of the time, when it used to be like 95%...so I'll take it!)

This won't be a problem if you're one to take care of your computer properly...but I'm a gremlin...Today, I vacuumed the innards of my computer because I needed to move it and it was dusty as hell and not cleaned in years. Cleaned out the fans and used a brush to knock loose caked up dust. After I set it up again...barely any audio issues. I used to have unbearable stuttering 100% of the time in PVP and combat situations, and 70-90% of the time in dungeons, overworld, cutscenes

Now I only experienced a couple seconds of very mild stuttering during PVP. My other roulettes, overworld, and in-town went fine. I havent gotten to do any cutscenes, and have yet to try the infamous P4N raid, but I'm very glad so far (too bad I already played thru MSQ on mute half the time...)

I will note that the other change I did was changing my sound settings to surround sound since I had the speakers for it but left it on stereo mode. (no change since pre-6.0) I don't really think this made a difference but I'll just put it out there...

UPDATE: very short and mild stutter in P4N. Changing settings back to stereo resulted in no difference (I have used these speakers from 5.0 so the only thing changed was the settings. The rear speakers do not emit sound from FFXIV regardless.) which means the only difference was me cleaning the computer x_x

Here's my specs as well, from the launcher config bc I dont really understand it:
windows 10 64 bit
intel core i7 950 @ 3.07 GHz (8CPUs) ~3.1GHz
RAM 6 GB
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti

I'm also on DirectX11 because DX9 caused me to D/C too often, which was unfavorable because of queues.


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