HDMI Audio popping noises on ATI Graphics Card – fixed!

When playing sound through my ATI HD4350 graphics card through the HDMI port, I was getting many popping sounds – and I found the fix. I am using Windows 7 Professional x64. The video was fine, but the audio had pops in it.

I found that the cause of the problem was that my computer was using the Microsoft HDMI audio driver instead of the ATI HDMI audio driver.

To fix this problem, I downloaded the latest Catalyst Control Center + drivers from the ATI website. However, when I installed these drivers, it only installed the graphics driver, but did not override the Microsoft HDMI audio driver.

To install the HDMI audio driver on Windows 7, do the following:

1. Go to Start->Control Panel->Sound, and select the “Playback” tab.
2. Right click on the “HDMI Output” playback device, and select “Properties”.
3. In the “general” tab, under “Controller Information”, if it says “Microsoft” anywhere, then it is using the Microsoft driver, and not the ATI driver.
4. Click on “Properties” in the “Controller Information” box
5. Go to the “Driver” tab, and click on “Update Driver”.
6. Click on “Browse my computer for driver software”, and choose the directory that the ATI driver install files were unzipped to. In my case, this was the C:\ATI\Support\10-6_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_enu directory. Make sure that “Include subfolders” is clicked.
7. Click on “Next”. It will find the HDMI audio driver and will install it.
8. A reboot may or may not be necessary. This got rid of the pops that I was hearing out of the HDMI output.

This problem occurred on an ASUS EAH4350 desktop graphics card – but it could perhaps occur on other graphics cards as well.