Possible Valve Tap?

Okay, so, I'm not sure if this is in the right place...If not, I'll repost wherever it's supposed to be, but anyway....

So driving home tonight I heard a "poof" of air and then the car got kind of loud. At idle and low speeds, I hear what sounds like a valve tap. The sound comes from dead center of the car and seems like it's coming from immediately on the other side of the dash. The car sounds awful but it idles/drives/accelerates/runs perfectly fine. Can you guys think of anything else it could possibly be or anything else I should look for? It's an 04 wrx with 157K on it. I don't know much about the car since i just bought it 3 weeks ago.

Sounds like you probably sprung a exhaust leak

But that wouldn't cause a tapping sound would it?

My friend who is a subaru dealer mechanic recommended checking the wastegate actuator door which I'm going to try tomorrow but I don't know.

Depending on the location of the leak it may sound like a tapping, but the waste gate door idea does make sense. I would check the whole intake/exhaust for issues.

Okay, sweet. Hopefully it's something easy like one of those things. Fingers crossed!!!!

Both exhaust leaks and loose heat shields can sound like much more serious problems. It's probably a fairly simple problem.

Chris said:

Both exhaust leaks and loose heat shields can sound like much more serious problems. It's probably a fairly simple problem.

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Definitely not a loose heat shield, I know that. But thank you guys, I never knew that exhaust leaks could be the possible cause. Hopefully that's all it is!

i blew an uppipe gasket doing a 3rd gear pull for tuning and it sounded like someone blew up a balloon and let go of the end lol ..sounded a lot like valve tick after that 

It skipped timing I won't know the extent of the damage until we pull it apart. I'm thinking there's a lot of damage since I drove it from Brunswick to Rockland like that.

How much timing? If it jumped so little it still ran well enough to drive that far, I doubt there's any damage. Couldn't have been more than a tooth, MAYBE two. One tooth off they run pretty crappy.

Sounds odd to me when you say it ran fine just loud ..usually jumped timing will cause rough running and a stumble ..possible either way but if it did jump it couldn't be much if it drove that far