Sound crackling/sound popping is a nasty glitch but I doubt that Demigod is responsible. There are many things that can cause such issues, and it is no surprise to me that Creative's sound cards are once again doing this (they have a history of it, sadly, although other cards and chipsets can have the same problem).

The best you can hope for is tweaking your settings (CMSS 3D and all of that) to find something the reduces or eliminates the sound glitch. Sound cards and drivers are notoriously glitchy, so I fear that GPG and Stardock will be unable to assist you with this.

Whoa, relax. Read my post above, as this does not appear to be a game-specific sound issue. Of the games you own, you may only experience it in Demigod, but I am certain that if you were to load up every game released for the PC in the last 2 years, several of them would suffer from this issue, especially the CPU-intensive ones. Sound cards/drivers are known for these issues, and the best you can do is hope that the maker of your sound hardware does something about it.

Let me reiterate: Sound cards, especially ones that provide a lot of environmental effects, or ones with poor driver support, tax the CPU. Because Demigod is demanding in terms of CPU, you may experience popping/crackling. You can adjust your sound settings outside of the game to turn off any 3D/environmental effects, or you can attempt to lower the load on your CPU through a variety of means.

I had the HL2 issue as well. The HL2 sound popping was actually more of a stuttering, load-related issue. Based on user reports in this thread, I would conclude that these problems are akin to the universal sound popping, and not engine-based stuttering a la Source.

No worries. I should say that in all of my experience in troubleshooting game-related performance, sound distortion/looping/hanging is usually the most troublesome. It's hard to diagnose the cause, hard to resolve it, and the hardware manufacturers (Realtek and Creative, namely) provide miserable drivers. Microsoft became so frustrated with poor hardware-based audio that they totally rewrote their audio stack for Vista, and attempted to force the OS to handle more sound processing.

Who knows, this could be an engine issue. I remember that another GPG game, Space Siege, had horrible sound distortion. I am simply providing my thoughts on what I believe to be the root cause, of which I am confident. Users with this issue need to take the following steps before blaming the game:

• Turn off environmental and 3D effects, or any other post-processing effects (reverb, yadda yadda)
• Update drivers
• If you have a sound card, remove it and test the game with onboard audio
• If you have onboard audio, try borrowing a sound card
• Check your CPU load
• Lower in-game audio settings
• Lower all in-game settings and see if reduced load on your machine reduces the sound distortion
• If all else fails, provide as much detail as possible to Stardock support; vague reports are meaningless

Sorry, like i wrote above, none of my posts were about the issue reported in this thread in particulary. Was just speaking my mind regarding other sound issues. And the truth is that about those two bugs i refered "there is no know 'we're looking into it' in sight".

I have the same problem - I have a SB Audigy and this is the only game with the crackling.  Turning off reverb doesnt fix it but seems to help a little bit. I have had some success with turning speakers to stereo from quadrophonic in Win Vista so try that :/ 

This thread had a working solution for me (lucky me finding the right thread directly)

http://forums.demigodthegame.com/347546