Popping/crackling sound after driver update on Claw 8

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kosztaz815e802ec

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I had perfect sound on my Claw 8 up until about two weeks ago, when I decided to do an updates check in the MSI Center M software. It found some new drivers, and as far as I could see from those drivers these three were sound related:
-Realtek OED Driver 20.42.274.2
-IntelliGo APO Driver 100.1.4.2000
-Intel Management Engine Driver 2433.6.3.0
I updated all the available drivers. And ever since I did that, I have been having occasional sound crackling/popping/clipping (not sure which one describes it best really). I have tried everything I could think of: reinstalled the Realtek audio driver (6.0.9738.1), I disabled certain components in "Windows Device Manager" that I think were using these additional new drivers, and yet I can't find a way to revert back to how the sound was on my Claw 8 before this update. I checked the installed apps section in Windows, unfortunately these drivers are not listed there, so I can't just easily remove them. I have no idea how to roll back to the state my unit was before the updates, as I had the system rollback feature disabled, so I can't go back to a previous Windows state. All I know is that I had a perfectly working system, and now the sound is messed up every now and then thanks to driver updates. And not just through the speakers, but in headphones too, independent of volume level.
I want to mention though that I am very perceptive to issues like this, for example my friend couldn't really hear it. But it's very obvious to me after it was working perfectly earlier. When I give throttle to the car in GTR2 (racing game) every time at the beginning of revving up the engine, there is a sound crackle. And so many other times. It's really distracting.
I have been waiting for a while as I thought other people will report on this problem too. I made an initial post about this on Reddit, but I didn't get much feedback, apart from a few guys saying they have similar issues. Surely we can't be the only ones, this must be a widespread issue, I think the average user just ignores it. I cannot ignore it on a £900 device, which otherwise would be almost perfect.
So I am hoping that commenting here on the official MSI forum this will get some traction, and hopefully there is a driver fix coming soon. Because apart from software bugs I cannot express how amazing this handheld pc is, and how much fun I am having with it. It's a shame that driver issues are letting it down.
 
Abel Lopez said:
Try to clean install the audio drivers first.
Follow the video tutorial: MSI® HOW TO Perform Clean Install Audio Related Drivers On MSI Intel Laptop
Get the drivers from MSI website: https://www.msi.com/Handheld/Claw-8-AI-Plus-A2VMX/support?sub_product=Claw-8-AI-Plus-A2VM#driver
The installation order should be: Intel Smart Sound Technology driver > Realtek Audio Driver > Realtek OED Driver >IntelliGo APO Driver > DTS Driver
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Thank you so much for your help, I followed your suggestion, and it worked! Although in the video the installation order wasn't quite the same as you wrote, and also had some additional installed software there, so where there was a difference, I just followed your installation order, and it worked out perfectly. The crackling and popping sounds have almost fully disappeared. Very rarely I still hear them (only did like 30 minutes testing so far), but it's so much better than before. It's perfectly usable now. So thank you again for your help, now I only have one remaining issue to solve somehow, but that will be for an other thread.
 
Ok here is my unfortunate update after extensively testing my Claw 8 today: I thought I had managed to mostly fix the audio crackling/popping issues, unfortunately nothing has changed or improved. I have tested the sound with DTS on (with every profile in the app) and off, both with speakers and with headphones, with all sorts of volume levels, in many different games and videos. No matter what I do or change, the sound crackling/popping is present. We need updated audio drivers that actually work.
 
I too have this issue, but it's unrelated to the update or audio drivers. The issue is ACPI.sys, aka the Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery in the Device Manager under the Battery section. You can check that this is the issue yourself by downloading and running Latencymon. Once you run it for about 20 seconds you'll see that ACPI.sys is the culprit for your audio latency and popping, as is my issue.

The only fix I've been able to find is not an ideal one. You have to disable the aforementioned "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" This will make it so you can't see your battery % anymore, but the popping I assure you will be gone.

MSI needs to figure out some way to reconfigure how many calls to ACPI.sys this system is making causing it to be overused and cause these issues.
 
rporter198129e02a2 said:
I too have this issue, but it's unrelated to the update or audio drivers. The issue is ACPI.sys, aka the Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery in the Device Manager under the Battery section. You can check that this is the issue yourself by downloading and running Latencymon. Once you run it for about 20 seconds you'll see that ACPI.sys is the culprit for your audio latency and popping, as is my issue.

The only fix I've been able to find is not an ideal one. You have to disable the aforementioned "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" This will make it so you can't see your battery % anymore, but the popping I assure you will be gone.

MSI needs to figure out some way to reconfigure how many calls to ACPI.sys this system is making causing it to be overused and cause these issues.
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Hi there, yeah I am pretty sure we talked about this on Reddit just the other day. Thanks for writing down your findings here, you saved me some time :). I really hope these findings will get back to the development team at MSI. I have done the same tests as you, and I have the same findings: no more audio issues when I disable "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" in Windows device manager (I also confirmed this with that Latencymon program). Unfortunately as I mentioned this on Reddit, in my case this resulted in a BSOD crash after about 15 minutes, while just browsing the internet. If someone at MSI needs some more information, screenshots, link to the original Reddit post, or anything else that could help fixing this issue, I am more than happy to assist, contact me here, or send me a private message. I absolutely love this device, it is something I have been dreaming about since my childhood, but this audio issue is extremely frustrating, and quite frankly spoils the whole experience.
 
I meet the same issue, install and reinstall the drivers, and seems no improvement; and higher workload may bring a worse noise, and network video play also failed. Need MSI team to fix it, so sad for this device that this issue be found after I got it, no happy time.
 
liqiangl15ab02e6 said:
I meet the same issue, install and reinstall the drivers, and seems no improvement; and higher workload may bring a worse noise, and network video play also failed. Need MSI team to fix it, so sad for this device that this issue be found after I got it, no happy time.
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It's really annoying. Although in my case the sound crackling is usually less frequent when I play high demand games. For me it's worse when I play low demand games, or when I just browse the web and watch YouTube videos.
 
I’m experiencing the same issue—it sounds like the speaker is distorted, especially when people are speaking. It didn’t happen when I first bought it, but after about two to three months of use, the problem started. I’ve never turned the volume above 50%. However, when I use headphones or connect to a Bluetooth speaker, the issue doesn’t occur. It seems like the problem is with the built-in speaker driver.
 
voravit.boo0ff90270 said:
I’m experiencing the same issue—it sounds like the speaker is distorted, especially when people are speaking. It didn’t happen when I first bought it, but after about two to three months of use, the problem started. I’ve never turned the volume above 50%. However, when I use headphones or connect to a Bluetooth speaker, the issue doesn’t occur. It seems like the problem is with the built-in speaker driver.
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Honestly to me it seems like possible hardware problem with the physical built-in speakers in your case. Sometimes speakers can go wrong even when not pushed too hard. The fact you don't experience audio issues through headphones would certainly indicate that to me.
 
Seems it is not a hardware issue, today I roll back the factory default OS and it is workable now by disabling the OS auto update, not sure what's the next step from MSI, but it is good by now.
!!!!Please backup your files with USB disk or NAS first, if needed
1- power off
2- push the LB and LT at the same time, then power on
3- select the "restore MSI factory settings" - > continuous -> system portion recovery -> yes
4- when login in at the first, attached a key board, "shift+F10", input the "OOBE\BYPASSNRO" to skip the network login at the first, then reboot.
5-step by steps, and choose the I have no internet connection, then login the windows.
6- disable the windows update by 5 weeks, then access the WIFI .
 
kosztaz815e802ec said:
Hi there, yeah I am pretty sure we talked about this on Reddit just the other day. Thanks for writing down your findings here, you saved me some time :). I really hope these findings will get back to the development team at MSI. I have done the same tests as you, and I have the same findings: no more audio issues when I disable "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" in Windows device manager (I also confirmed this with that Latencymon program). Unfortunately as I mentioned this on Reddit, in my case this resulted in a BSOD crash after about 15 minutes, while just browsing the internet. If someone at MSI needs some more information, screenshots, link to the original Reddit post, or anything else that could help fixing this issue, I am more than happy to assist, contact me here, or send me a private message. I absolutely love this device, it is something I have been dreaming about since my childhood, but this audio issue is extremely frustrating, and quite frankly spoils the whole experience.
Click to expand...
Can you please send me a PM about this?
 
Abel Lopez said:
Can you please send me a PM about this?
Click to expand...
Hi I tried to PM you, I simply can't even after multiple tries. What I write gets reported as Spam, even without any links in the message.

Anyway as it's not sensitive information I will tro to write it here:

There is a Reddit thread where a couple of guys and I are discussing what could be the cause of this issue. Just search for this on google: "MSI Claw 8 audio popping Reddit". The first result should take you to the thread. It has 52 replies, and the original post was made by a forum member called PossessionStatus7221. Also please open the buried replies there too, as the proper information will be in a sub section in that thread.
And be warned, a lot of guess work is going on there, some misinformation and misidentification of possible solutions. It's a big guess work, but there was definitely one conclusion that is true, the one that was discussed earlier in this post here as well: if we disable ACPI battery device in Windows Device Manager, the audio issue will be solved. This is the only real solution, I tried everything else mentioned there (like playing around with the DTS software, reinstalling audio related drivers) nothing else works, some I thought improved things, but I am fairly sure by now that was just placebo. The only real fix for audio crackling issue is if I disable ACPI battery. But I don't like to do that, as that's very important for battery management.
It seems to me that when I play high demand games the audio issues are a lot less frequent, and I mainly encounter them when I play really lightweight games, or doing tasks that are easy on the system like watching videos on YouTube, listening to music etc.
 
I fixed it 100%. Just remove driver for Ai Boost and disable it.
 

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Jurgimba said:
I fixed it 100%. Just remove driver for Ai Boost and disable it.
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This doesn't fix it. I disabled it, ran the program Latencymon and it still says the problem is ACPI.sys. Has nothing to do with Ai Boost.

The only real way this gets fixed is when MSI updates the BIOS to address this. It's definitely BIOS related if you've gone as deep as I have down this rabbit hole.
 
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I have the same sound issue after the installation of the graphics driver from the Intel's website 6874 dated 30.05.2025.
Disabling Intel AI boost resolved the issue, still it is not the fix and we are missing functionality we've paid for and facing the other issues related to the AI engine such as broken search in the Start menu and we are unable to use AI-related scaling like XeSS 2 or even the regular XeSS/FSR
 
drimsa15c502e7 said:
I have the same sound issue after the installation of the graphics driver from the Intel's website 6874 dated 30.05.2025.
Disabling Intel AI boost resolved the issue, still it is not the fix and we are missing functionality we've paid for and facing the other issues related to the AI engine such as broken search in the Start menu and we are unable to use AI-related scaling like XeSS 2 or even the regular XeSS/FSR
Click to expand...
I have read about the recent Intel driver issues causing sound and game stutter problems. Honestly I think we are talking about different things here, the one I described has been present from the get-go, it's not recent, and it's not that obvious as the problems you guys are facing now because of that driver update. The sound crackling I talk about is sometimes barely present, other times it's quite annoying, but for less observant people it would not be obvious during gameplay.
 
drimsa15c502e7 said:
I have the same sound issue after the installation of the graphics driver from the Intel's website 6874 dated 30.05.2025.
Disabling Intel AI boost resolved the issue, still it is not the fix and we are missing functionality we've paid for and facing the other issues related to the AI engine such as broken search in the Start menu and we are unable to use AI-related scaling like XeSS 2 or even the regular XeSS/FSR
Click to expand...
I hope it solved it for you but I'm highly skeptical. If you get the time I'd recommend running a program called Latencymon for 2 mins and see if it spikes to Red. If it does, that indicates a moment when a "pop" would occur if you're running something with sound.
 
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