A new update from Creative on the crackling and popping issues some people are experiencing with their SoundBlaster X-Fi cards. According to Creative the sound glitches only arise on nForce 4 motherboards and only nVidia is able to fix them.
A full technical description is detailed below, but in brief, the PCI bus data requests are not being serviced leading to "gaps" in the audio, resulting in sudden dropouts to no audio and back again which gives rise to what is perceived as crackling.
X-Fi Zone
X-Fi Zone