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Fixing Windows 10 audio glitching and delays In this case, enabling Windows 10 hardware acceleration for audio playback induces latency and delays in setting up the hardware acceleration and beginning playback of hardware-accelerated audio. In this particular case, these audio issues can be traced back to a newish feature in Windows 10, known as hardware-accelerated audio. While in principal hardware acceleration of audio and video can result in far-better performance than software-accelerated audio/video playback, if not perfectly implemented it can cause some severe problems and side effects.
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The aforementioned audio glitches and delays in audio playback that affect Windows 10 systems are completely a result of the drivers. Unfortunately, poor drivers have long plagued audio devices on Windows and while we are finally at a point where most PCs and laptops will play audio out-of-the-box without needing to install 3rd party drivers, oftentimes these WHQL-certified audio drivers are still not up to par and have considerable issues.
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Garbling of the first ~half second of audio output after a period of silence.
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This can be easily verified by clicking on the audio icon in the taskbar and changing the volume level: if it takes longer than 100ms for the audio notification previewing the volume level to sound, you are probably affected by this problem. A great example of this is the Windows 10 UAC prompt, where the message box can appear but the accompanying ding does not play until a full second or so later.
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