Quote Originally Posted by intarweb View Post
I haven't had sound problems in other games so far, so I do kind of wonder if maybe HL2 is doing something fishy. I sort of suspect it may be related to having voice chats going on as they seem to really aggrivate the problem. So, it could be that it's having trouble dealing with sounds of multi sample rates (which I think it resamples all to 48KHz per the AC97 spec), but that could still be hardware. It's kind of weird that restarting tends to fix the problem.
I have had this issue with teamspeak before even with a Xifi card, noise got verry erratic and crackled sometimes, seemed it had loads of interference... think it's more software related then hardware mate, I didn't have this on 32bit OS but on 64 it came back... now with the latest version I don't have those issues (though I updated my creative drivers too)