Delayed system alert sounds

I have a little problem which is an annoyance more than anything else - though it could indicate a more serious problem.
The system alert sounds on my 17" PowerBook occur approximately two seconds after an alert winow appears. Sometimes I don't actually hear my prefered alert sound - I just hear the speaker make a very quite crackle.
When I shut down the alert sound which should accompany the Restart/Sleep/Cancel/Shutdown option is not heard until the desktop has disappeared and the progress wheel (not the beachball) is rotating.
Any clues, please?
TIA
Alf

Systems before X played system beeps perfectly. OS X seems to read all beeps off the hard drive. I have never been able to get OS X to play a beep without accessing the hard drive, which annoys me far beyond this tiny little issue might deserve. I understand why systems should move away from direct calls to the hardware, but this is certainly a downgrade in the human interface, when what took microseconds in OS 6-9 now takes deciseconds. I've noticed that the cache holds the system beep a bit better in 10.4, so that there's a minimal delay, but still not as good as my old macs. The more able computers get, the harder it is for them to do the simple things. The corollary is that system programmers focus on new features instead of improving performance, or it's easier to write new code than to shorten old code.

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Delayed system alert sounds

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