I've just started using Dolphin again after about a year and I've been having Audio problems which I've tried finding solutions to with no success. I've played a couple of games so far with DSP HLE. The problem I run into with DSP HLE is that suddenly about a minute to 10 minutes into playing anything there will be static and then the sound just stops in either the left or right speaker. I tried 3.5 and 3.0 versions of dolphin. I also tried LLE, but it the sound stutters more and there's a huge fps drop. Even when dedicating it to a thread.
Any tips?
We really can't help you all that much without knowing which games you're specifically trying to play.
LLE audio will stutter if your system is unable to maintain fullspeed emulation. Since LLE audio is more demanding than HLE audio, you can naturally expect a drop in FPS for some games depending on your hardware. You can either try to upgrade your hardware, overclock your CPU, or use the VBeam Trick (right-click game, enable Accurate VBeam Emulation and/or disable Enable Idle Skipping). Note, the VBeam Trick won't alleviate lower FPS, but might help with stuttering sound in LLE audio.
The games I'm trying to play are Kirby's Return to Dreamland and Donkey Kong Returns.
I've got an 8 core 8120 Bulldozer processor and a GTX 670. Shouldn't that be fast enough? If not I have an 8350 processor coming in a few days.
Bulldozer CPUs don't do spectacularly well with Dolphin, especially in comparison to an Ivy Bridge CPU at the same clock. Although Dolphin does get a noticeable boost on quad-core+ systems, it'll only dedicate at most 3 major threads for the bulk of its processing, so having 8 cores isn't going to be much of solution. It depends on the performance level of the CPU, and Bulldozer is not too strong in single-threaded applications.
If you aren't in the market to switch to Intel, you really should overclock your CPU as far as it will go. Get a decent cooler beforehand though.
Guess I'll have to hope that the 1 GHZ speed difference with the FX-8350 coming in a few days will help to use LLE. (It'll be OCd to 4.6 GHz)
Well, you can overclock this CPU as high as you can, but you'll never achieve fullspeed in demanding games which need LLE (e.g. Super Mario Galaxy). The microarchitecture and the performance per core is not good with AMD FX CPUs.
Just wanted to say that I now got the games I mentioned (Kirby and Donkey Kong) running flawlessly without any more HLE audio problems. It may sound strange, but everything seems to be working perfectly once I deleted the Save State folder. There was one save in there. I no longer get audio crackling/glitches with HLE and I have consistant 60 FPS using DX 11, 1920x1080, 4x resolution, 4xAA, 16xAF, EFB to RAM with the rest of the settings default.
So, you did use save states? This isn't strange at all... savestates CAN cause problems.