Terrible noises from subwoofer of ACER Aspire 6930 with Realtek sound chip

Question

After approximately 5-15 min of listening to music my subwoofer begins to make terrible noises. He's just "coughing". That began after 6 months I had this computer.

Now I found out, that I can temporarily fix this problem by "restarting" the audio stream of the application that plays music. For example reloading last.fm page (reloads the flash file). Another way to reset the audio playback is switching the speaker configuration shown below in the screenshot.

According to many posts on the internet like http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/52918-20-acer-aspire-6935g-speaker-problem

• ACER support isn't any help
• Exchanging hardware doesn't fix the problem
• Even the later models have this problem

Turning off the volume of the subwoofer is not an option to me. I still have warranty (I bought an extension of one year). I already tried about 15 versions of the Realtek driver with no success. I am not sure but MAYBE the problem did not occur on the original windows vista that was shipped with this computer. However, I removed the original windows for good reasons (english).

What do you suggest me? Did anyone fix this problem? Maybe by writing a script which resets the audio streams every 5 minutes? Shall I take the effort to deal with the acer support until they give me another model? (I won't have a computer than for a longer time, will spend money on telephone hotlines (1,30 EUR / min)......)

Here are additional infos, if they are any help:

• Windows 7 64 Bit (Original was Windows Vista Home Premium 32 Bit)
• All specs
• Audio driver version:

Solution 1

An Update of the Realtek driver, which came out about half a year after my question, solved the problem. So, this was a software problem.

Solution 2

I have the same laptop, I think I know what you mean, for me it was the sub woofer switching off, and the bass frequencies going to the small L/R speakers causing distortion, or just messing up the bass sound. Go to your "sound", do you have more then one sound card?
[For me, it was SRS sandbox] kept switching the default sound device [my computer still showed the Realtek sound device as the default, but it wasn't actually], causing the sub woofer to sound all crackly and distorted. I'd try disabling all other sound devices.

Comments

[Simon Sheehan]

If the subwoofer is actually in the laptop, don't expect much..

[OneWorld]

This is in exact terms more a frequency range extender. However, the sound of my laptop is much fuller and louder than other ones. So I am very happy using it.

[Radu Andrei]

you have a link to that new Realtek driver?

[Jo Silter]

I'm a bit late! Here's the driver- 6.0.1.6257 drivers.softpedia.com/…

[OneWorld]

The problem seems to be related to the power usage or power supply. I recently had the issue again, when I plugged in my USB Harddrive that is self powered. Also in 2010 the noices started, when the second hard disk started rotating.