Poor sound quality disrupting video calls
I have a new (4 months old) Acer SWIFT SF314-57G, i7 processor, 16 GB RAM, Windows 10 home. Since the pandemic I am making regular video calls using a variety of platforms (Skype, Zoom, Jitsi, Cisco and others). I have noticed that the sound quality is often very poor - a lot of crackling and cut-outs in the sound stream.This is true using several different locations and different wireless networks, i.e. this is not a connection issue. Recently the issues have become so severe that it is hard to follow some meetings. In addition, I notice that the computer slows dramatically concurrently with the poor sound quality. Sometimes this leads to the video call freezing or in one case, blue screen of death. The problems are the same whether I use the laptop speakers, or my own headphones. The problems persist even if I switch off the video stream. I have tried a few things - reinstalling the audio driver (via the Windows Audio Troubleshooting function), disabling Audio Enahncements, and disabling 'Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device'. I have also tried reinstalling the Audio Driver supplied on the Acer website. Does anyone else have this problem either with this model or another Acer model? I'm not sure if this is a windows 10 issue or an Acer issue?
