Windows audio crackling randomly - Possible solution?

My WDM audio crackles (not all the time, but intermittently - moreso on the input than the output) both in and out while going through the Apollo 8p via thunderbolt.

I've routed my microphone physically out of one of the line-outs of the Apollo and into the realtek line-in on my motherboard in the meantime, since I use my microphone outside of the DAW for other applications which don't support ASIO. The crackling was not useable. This work-around remedies the input issues but not the output issues. It also shouldn't really be an issue at all but, these things happen.

I've seen tons of other users mention these issues, but I haven't seen a fix. I believe the issue might be that the WDM driver for UAD forces 32-bit audio, no matter what your sample rate is set to. It still has all the options for other sample rates, but it only has options for 32-bit, which will never match the bit-rate of the Apollo, which I is probably what is causing the crackling. I believe if it allowed you to select 24-bit it would fix the issue, since the Apollo natively uses 24-bit audio.

Are there any dev's that would be able to confirm or deny this? I feel like this really might be the issue and is probably easily fixable.

I think all windows users are facing the same issue and it's really frustrating. I can't even playback anything on my pc without hearing the crackling. As you mention, using the Apollo wdm drivers for input is even worse, totally unusable. I've gone back to my old saffire pro 40 and using the Apollo 8p as a adat preamp...

I am having this issue on my two machines running Apollos and windows 10. I hope this gets addressed soon.

Same thing 'round here, but I have clean audio when I use 96kHz. anything below that is unusable. with 96kHz, I can use the system WDM and Reaper's Asio. but I won't even try to mix @96kHz.

Check your power options. Start - settings - search for edit power plan - change advanced power settings - processor power management. Make sure minimum and maximum processor state is both at 100%.

Hey kirre777. they are. I'm using high performance profile. I'm probably having trouble with the drivers.
to complete my saga, the thunderbolt software is not "approving" apollo anymore. it warns me that the card is connected, but when I click always connect, nothing happen.