Hey all, I have the G550. I usually use my edirol ua-25 USB soundcard, it works well and is a great robust external soundcard which provides the amplification I need for headphones/direct to an amp. It works perfectly on my desktop P.C and on my previous laptop.
I installed the soundcard and put the drivers on, but there was an unusual sort of gappy playback, unacceptable for listening to music. After searching through every option I could find, I finally gave up and uninstalled the edirol ua-25 - only to find that this playback problem is now in the in-built connexant smartaudio soundcard AS WELL!!! 
I have reinstalled the connexant smartaudio drivers from the lenovo site, but the issue still remains: clicks and digital pops in my playback. The CPU usage is higher than I would expect, winamp says sort of between 0% - 15%. Smartaudio.exe is always running, which I don't like.
I started looking into IRQ conflicts, as that'd be the number 1 reason for this. nothing obvious, no conflict that I can see. I ran a DPC Latency checker, which always comes up as very poor (continually red.) [d]elayed [p]rocedure [c]alls are to do with windows ducking interupt requests and saving them for later; if this is to do with audio, it produces bad pops. I don't know if this is the problem, however, the website I was following said so.
so, the issue still remains; bad digital clicks and pops. thanks everyone for your patience in reading this, and your support.
Thomas
