Amid increasing complaints from X-Fi users, Creative has spoken up to the Inq regarding the popping/crackling sounds that many users are having to deal with. Creative's European Audio Business Manager, Franco De Bonis, let it be known that the issues revolved around mostly high-spec gaming systems with nForce 4 chipsets.

The problem, according to Creative, is one of PCI bus/memory bus contention:

Creative believes that the larger volume of data being requested is causing larger access delays to system memory, especially when Sound Blaster X-Fi is sharing memory access with high-end graphics and hard drives.

"We have found that with certain high-end systems and configurations, Sound Blaster X-Fi is being held off from receiving data from the PCI bus for significant periods of time, in some cases for close to two-thirds of a millisecond. This causes our audio buffers to underflow, which produces crackling sounds," he said.

Mr. De Bonis went on further and explained that a BIOS update will resolve the issues on most motherboards.

I'm glad to see that Creative is being forward about this (even if a little late), and taking decisive action. What I don't understand is why they didn't do more extensive testing on high-spec nForce 4 systems -- the X-Fi is after all being marketed towards the high-end gamer types. It only stands to reason that they (Creative) would certify it on as many high-end nForce 4 systems as possible.