After much research, trial and error and old fashioned hard work I think I solved this crackle and noise problem.

I want to thank all those in this forum that contributed to the overwhelming flood of ideas and things to try. I also received many ideas from people at Dell and Tascam. This was one tough nut to crack that stumped some very smart people. At each step along the way I tried to manage the troubleshooting process by exploring the lowest hanging and most risk-free fruit.

Someone in this thread mentioned getting rid of the “crapware” and that idea resonated with me so I simply uninstalled the Dell SupportAssist software as a stab in the dark. So far, this seems to have solved the problem. Over the last few days I’ve accumulated approx. 2 hours of crackle-free music. And today I got Dell Tech Support back on the phone and shared my progress; he wasn’t overly surprised and said that their software runs continuously in the background and could be the root cause of the noise. I pointed out that there were several other Dell applications loaded on my machine. We decided to uninstall them all one by one. These were

Dell Digital Delivery Services
Dell SupportAssist OS Recovery Plugin for Dell Updates
Dell SupportAssist Remediation
Dell Update for Windows Universal

In addition to learning a lot about PC technology, I also (re)learned that perseverance can really pay off.

My plan is to observe my system for a few more days and then re-enable Intel Speedstep. For good measure I also plan to install my new USB cable and apply a bit of DeoxIT to the connectors.

I showed the Dell guy LatencyMon and DPC Latency Checker and asked if Dell had any such tools. He said he was unaware of any. This tells me that there are areas of computer technology where we, in this forum, are more sophisticated and advanced than Dell tech support people.

Moral of the story: If you really don’t need a software program, uninstall it. It may be crapware hiding in full sight.

Thanks again to all those that helped.

https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677
BiaB 2025 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.