Constant static/noise in sound.

kakakoka · Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 2:35 pm Post subject: Constant static/noise in sound.

Hi,
I get a constant high pitched sound out of my speakers or headphones. As the sound is not that high in volume I only really notice it when nothing else is playing, but then its quite annoying.

The noise is present and constant disregarding mixer settings, and I can even hear it when everything is muted in alsa-mixer.

Even when I rmmod anything soundrelated inclusive snd and the intel8x0 module the sound persists, so I figure it is strictly hardware related.

My hardware is a onboard nforce2 "soundstorm" chip and I have connected a logitech surround sound (i think its a model 760), but the noise persists when connecting my headphones directly to the soundcards out plug, so the noise must come from within my system.

The static seems to be affected a bit when moving windows and having other things move graphically (like the cursor when typing).

Any suggestions as to how I can fix this?

Regards
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chrisR

Hi

I have exactly the same problen with my asus deluxe nforce2 board and logitech Soundman system. Keep meaning to post to the forums. I wonder whether it's interference from my power supply Antec Powersure 350W (unlikely) or akasa processor fan(more likely) or that my speakers are too close to my knackered old 17" monitor.

Can anyone lend a hand here?

rustedcage · n00b Joined: 23 Dec 2003 Posts: 4 Location: USA

But check to see if your MIC is on or set to record.
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egar · Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 11:44 pm Post subject:

I also have the same problem with a similar system config. I too am running a nForce 2 mainboard (ASUS A7N8X Deluxe) with Logitech speakers (X-220). I get the same high pitched whine under Gentoo and Suse. I don't get the whine under Windows XP.

I read somewhere that the noise is caused by the processor but no one seemed to have a solution. I am starting to think it is interference from the processor also. I've noticed that under high CPU usage the noise goes away, but will return as soon as the CPU usage falls to lower levels.

Sorry I don't have any solutions, but if we can find enough similarities between our systems maybe we can find a pattern.

kakakoka · Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 1:29 am Post subject:

I like the idea about mapping out the symptoms

Well, I have tried disconnecting my cpu fan (for a very short while) to see if it was causing the noise, but it had no effect. Also the noise isnt present before around the place where init starts applying drivers to my harddrives. However this is probably a coincidence since I havent noticed any other relation to hard drive activity.

So far my best bet is that its related to CPU activity (reversely as suggested above).

Also I havent noticed the noise in windows XP either.
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Halcy0n · Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 2:36 am Post subject:

I have the Asus A7N8X-Deluxe as well and also have the same exact problem. I have a 4.1 Klipsch speaker system. I never really tried figuring out what was causing the problem though. I just put my SB Live! back in and didn't worry about it anymore. If someone can come up with a possible solution, I'd love to use the onboard sound instead. I also never had the problem in Windows, but I don't have that even to dual boot into anymore

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chrisR · Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 11:59 am Post subject:

I think it's hard drive related, I listened on my headphones while my machine booted this morning, silence until it checked for drives, because I haven't got my kernel right yet there's a minute or two delay checking for a new SATA drive, soon as it starts checking the whining starts and guess what the whining is in perfect time with the h/d light on the facia. The SATA drive is a recent second drive and I don't think it's cos it's SATA because the others IDE and I've had the noise from day one. But they are both Maxtor at 7200rpm.

egar · Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:08 pm Post subject:

I've spent some time this morning checking on the drive and CPU theories. I used KDE System Guard to measure CPU utilization, disk reads, disk writes, and total number of disk accesses. Then a ran a number of programs (like recompiliing packages and moving data from one disk to another) to vary CPU utilization and disk activity. I couldn't find any relationship between disk activity and the noise. On my machine the only correlation I could find was between CPU utilization and the noise. If CPU utilization is below 90% I get the whine from the speakers, above 90% - silence.

I didn't mention in the first post that the noise started when I got new (better) speakers. When I run my old cheapo speakers I don't get the noise. It may have to do with the better signal to noise ratios on the better speakers.

Opinions?

egar · Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2004 3:41 am Post subject:

OK, my last stab at this thing. I played around with overclocking of my AMD 2400+ processor. Pushed it higher (185 MHz FSB), dropped it back to standard (133 MHz FSB), and such. The whine varies with the bus settings, better at 133 MHz, better at 185 MHz, worse at 166 MHz. In no case did the noise go away.

I guess my lesson out of all of this ... overclock more, it reduces the annoying noise. Who cares if I shorten the life of the processor if I improve the quality of my life.

kakakoka · Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2004 8:01 am Post subject:

Interesting conclusion, unfortunately the more I would overclock the louder a fan I would have to stick on the processor, meaning more noise, since i cannot afford watercooling

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sneakerski · Apprentice Joined: 14 Oct 2003 Posts: 168

are you guys using aRTs? i have ZERO problems when just using soundstorm through the ALSA 1.0.1 drivers built into the 2.6.1-mm4 kernel. Surround sound even works. the only limitation is that i can only use one source of sound at once (aRTs is a cpu-level software mixer, which combines multiple threads of sound into one and outputs it to the sound chip. this was the source of sucky quality for me. so it's a trade off: good sound or more than one source at once)
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jetblack · Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2004 4:18 pm Post subject:

I noticed similar behavior from my Intel i8x0 soundcard on my laptop, but only with 2.6 kernels. It's fine with 2.4. Weird. It's not really loud enough to notice most of the time unless I'm right next to the speakers, so I'm going to see if it shakes out with later versions of the kernel.

Are any of you seeing this behavior on 2.4 kernels?

Bombs14 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Sep 2003 Posts: 140

I have the exact same problem. It doesn't seem to be the mixer settings, for I have set everything to 0, but yet the static is still there.

It doesn't seem to be an X error either, static exists even when just playing mp3's from the terminal.

>_<

Bombs14 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Sep 2003 Posts: 140

Hmmm, I just disabled the script "Athcool" from running and all the static stops. I guess it was a problem with the PCI timings.

Maybe some of you are also running a similar script to cool down your CPU?

chrisR · Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 9:31 pm Post subject:

Tell us more, where's Athcool, I'm not running it as far as I know.

Bombs14 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Sep 2003 Posts: 140

If Athcool is running, you can stop it with: /etc/init.d/athcool stop

I'm not sure what other scripts there are to cool down the CPU, but probably any script that changes the PCI latency could affect that constant static problem.

egar · Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2004 4:29 am Post subject:

I wasn't running athcool or any other similar utilities, but was able to fix the problem with my install.

Unfortunately I somewhat abandoned sound problem solving methodology (out of despiration and laziness

). I made a couple of changes at the same time and then took a couple of days before going back into Gentoo after my last shutdown, thus forgetting exactly everything I had done. I guess that's just a long way to say YMMV.

Anyway what I think made the difference was a bad entry in the /etc/hotplug/pci.rc file. The following line contained a line break which caused and error in the initiation of the sound devices.

tigrysek · Posted: Tue Jun 22, 2004 7:17 pm Post subject:

Same problem here... everything is right until i start playing any sound. Then the noise comes and lasts until next reboot. tried different settings in the kernel sound system, but nothing helps... any1 has a idea what's going on ??

erwan · Apprentice Joined: 01 Jun 2003 Posts: 150 Location: Tokyo

I had this problem recently (nForce2). Booting with a Geexbox live-cd proved me that my problem was due to my config (no problem with the geexbox cd) so I recompiled my kernel, reemerged alsa-related ebuilds and reconfigured alsa using Gentoo Handbook.

I don't really know why, but now the noise has gone.
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geforce · l33t Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 653 Location: Canada

exactly the same problem and Config.... But only under Windows. ..
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