Thinkpads Forum

I have my ThinkPad W520 hooked up to external speakers via an amp, and I've noticed under various circumstances that audio playback will encounter some kind of interference-- causing the sound to momentarily break up or get "choppy." The phenomenon occurs particularly when I have heavy concurrent network activity, such as downloading/uploading files or using bittorrent. Interestingly, I've experienced the issue both when playing directly through the onboard soundcard-- using the line out-- as well as with an external USB soundcard (Turtle Beach) I recently purchased. It occurs when playing mp3s both from the local drive and from external drives.

This hardly ever happened with my T60p using the exact same external audio system arrangement. The only time it would occur was when playing mp3s from an external drive, and there would be a minor lag (I think) from the file playing through WinAmp, but it was very rare. I've haven't tried another media player aside from WinAmp, but I have a feeling it has something to do with the W520 and not the media software.

Could background activity from the SSD be the problem? (as it occurs primarily when downloading, as I mentioned.) If anyone has any ideas as to what might be causing the issue, I'd be most appreciative as it's a pretty annoying problem.

"when I have heavy concurrent network activity" - Wireless or wired, or both?

Can we assume that there is no noticeable audio interference when listening the same audio file(s) and using the same media software via the builtin speaker and via headphones? (Though, there'll be a question of you really should be able to hear the interference from the headphones, since it's the same physical 3.5mm out port.)

I'm always using a wired connection through the dock-- perhaps I should try it via the wireless connection and see if it makes a difference? and I'm not sure about the built in speaker or with headphones, I can try. Somebody replied on a different forum that it's probably a latency issue and to switch to a different network driver which I'm going to test as well...

ok, apparently this is a rather known issue on various ThinkPads with latency issues related to the network driver as described in this thread on the Lenovo support forums. Users there have reported that using an older version of the driver-- supplied by HP, interestingly enough-- seems to resolve the issue. I also decided to run LatencyMon, which demonstrated very clearly that network related drivers above all had high potential for causing audio playback issues.

I'm going to try installing this older network driver, but I also see a recently updated (ver 17.1 / 05/15/2012) driver on the Intel site here. Is there any reason that installing this driver directly from Intel would be a bad idea?