Running 0404 from Laptop with Grado 225's. The laptop has a gig of ram and AMD Turon 64 1.8 ghz cpu. Use foobar to play music.

The problem (In two parts):

1.) While listening to music, I occasionally get a little hint of static in the song, like a slight stutter. It's not clipping as it never happens in the same spot of the song. I usually get it around 2-3 times per song.

I've determined part of it is a latency issue, as the crackles coincide with latency spikes. The latency is also related to my Broadcom Wlan card- when the card is disabled, my latency is lower and I get little to no latency spikes and crackles. Is there any fix for this? I've already been to http://www.musicxp.net/ and enacted all the methods they've suggested for improving PC speed, and I've gotten the latest drivers for everything.

2.) I'm trying to get ASIO to work. The EMU ASIO drivers barely work. It slows my system down a lot, and takes about five seconds from the time I start a song until the time it plays. And then, when the song starts playing after about 5-10 seconds of good play I get extreme static, like the kind you get with a very fuzzy radio station. When I skip to a different part of the song or change songs it stops and I get another 5-10 good seconds followed by the extreme static.

I've also tried ASIO4All, which works but I get a fairly high occurence of crackling that doesn't always relate to latency spikes (though some of it does).

Sorry if this doesn't all make sense, it's almost 3 am and I'm a little tired. Anyways, any help would be appreciated.

Unlike gaming cards, professional and semi-pro cards that don't use the Windows mixer don't do resampling or have any other problems associated with Windows messing with the audio data. I don't know any reason to want an ASIO driver for playback. ASIO can be important when recording, to reduce the latency that makes it hard to record new tracks in sync with existing tracks, but it gives no advantage for simple playback. Do you have this problem with the non-ASIO driver?

With the 0404 USB you cannot get SPDIF without ASIO AFAIK. Correct me if I am wrong

That certainly isn't common with soundcards in general, but I suppose it is possible Emu chose to only provide that code in their ASIO driver.