Boot Camp: Dated Broadcom Driver Causes Audio Pops and Crackles

I have had a problem with my MacBook Pro having intermittent crackles and pops in the audio in my late 2009 Macbook Pro Unibody. I previously suspected the Cirrus Audio driver.  Restarting “Windows Audio” (aka audiosrv) fixes the problem. The pattern is that everything is fine on boot. The crackles and pops start after resuming from sleep.

I just came across this post which indicates the problem is actually caused somehow by the the 802.11a feature of the Broadcom wireless network adapter. Somewhat incredulously, I gave this a try and it works so far.

It also seems that although, Apple has not seen fit to send out an update, Broadcom has published several newer versions of their 943XX driver. These are available from other OEMs using Broadcom chips (Acer, Dell and HP) that actually provide updates for Windows drivers on a regular basis. HP helpfully offers a version of the Broadcom Wireless driver that is almost a year newer than the one in Boot Camp 3.1. The revision history of here shows notes a series of performance enhancements over the Apple-distributed version 5.60.18.8.

Update

Some good folks have taken it upon themselves to scrape together Broadcom wireless driver downloads posted by various OEMs. Note that sometimes the stuff in the forums is newer than what is listed in the pinned initial post. At the time of this writing, the latest available is 5.100.249.2 from Acer.

Update 2

I’m still getting the intermittent pops and crackles. Perhaps I have unfairly maligned the Broadcom driver based on random info from the interwebs. I just realized that the speakers on my Cinematic Display are running at the same time as my nice speakers on the mini-jack. Maybe that has something to do with it. Still futzing.