Quote Originally Posted by ranker View Post
I think I finally found the solution to the problem after a days worth of agonizing troubleshooting. The problem seems to have been exacerbated by high volume set by software. After lowering the master volume of the card down to 50%, I noticed the distortions decreased by a small amount. However, they were still present.

After removing almost everything from the computer, I realized that the problems became disappeared. After 3-4 hours of painstaking debugging (oh how I love my computer science background), the culprit was my Logitech webcam w/ built in microphone. After unplugging it, 98% of my distortions/scp's disappeared altogether.

Go figure.
glad you figured out the culprit . On my XtremeMusic, I had to set Wave Volume to 50%, Master Volume to 40% to be free of most crackling, but I never quite got the problem completely solved. I don't think it was a USB device in my case, since I am using the same configuration with my Prelude, yet I don't hear any of the SCP in music or games

Just goes to show you that there's no one easy solution for this since everyones configuration is so different