PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

This distortion is like a crackly echoey distortion. It actually has an echo component to it, When I change the output and it goes normal for a few seonds and tehre is a song playing, then it kicks in, the sound quality goes way down, it has this crackling sound, and very noticeable echo comes on the voices and the drums (which you can barely make out over the crackling). Output is perfect if forced to use ALSA directly, or if I boot into windows Seven. This is all pulse audio (probably), the piece of crap.
When I go "pulseaudio --kill" and then "mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 <file>" it plays perfectly without distortion. When I go alsamixer -c0 none of the sliders have any gain, they are all at 0db or -1db or so.
To stop the distortion, chanigng from 44100 to 48000 and so on in the /etc/pulse/ whatever file doesnt work. What does work is opening pavucontrol and changing the internal audio on the configuration page. I hav a Barts thing that is turned off and an Internal Audio that can be set to a huge list of things like Analog Surround 5.0 Out, Analog Stereo Duplex, Analog Surround 7.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input, so on and so forth.
Now changing from one to another will randomly make the distortion go away for 30 seconds, until I open a new program, close pavucontrol, or just wait a while, then it will come back on, and I'll have to change it to another, which won't work at first usually but randomly will. There is NO CORRELATION between what is actually chosen and what does and doesnt have distortion straight away.
Basically PulseAudio is $#!+ all the sudden, and I don't know why. I have a fully updated system, hardware is as follows:
$ lspci | grep udio
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Barts HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6800 Series]
Also plays it fine as testing with mplayer, so this is a pulseaudio thing (i think). WTH????
[EDIT] And here is the lsmod:
$ lsmod
Module Size Used by
uas 8170 0
usb_storage 43628 1
ipv6 280362 48
md5 4127 2
hmac 2937 1
nls_utf8 1320 5
cifs 265094 6
fscache 39883 1 cifs
it87 28123 0
hwmon_vid 2796 1 it87
usbhid 36375 0
hid 78087 1 usbhid
snd_hda_codec_hdmi 22857 1
snd_hda_codec_realtek 295717 1
snd_seq_dummy 1479 0
snd_seq_oss 29240 0
fglrx 2679751 87
snd_seq_midi_event 5516 1 snd_seq_oss
vboxdrv 1760035 0
snd_seq 50562 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_hda_intel 21837 6
snd_hda_codec 74609 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel
snd_seq_device 5281 3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
r8169 36414 0
ohci_hcd 21338 0
ppdev 5854 0
firewire_ohci 26921 0
snd_hwdep 6222 1 snd_hda_codec
snd_pcm_oss 39509 0
parport_pc 31800 1
snd_mixer_oss 17730 1 snd_pcm_oss
lp 8992 0
firewire_core 50038 1 firewire_ohci
snd_pcm 72321 6 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_pcm_oss
mii 3842 1 r8169
evdev 9361 12
fuse 65179 5
xhci_hcd 65218 0
parport 30087 3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp
edac_core 35034 0
i2c_piix4 8176 0
ehci_hcd 38878 0
crc_itu_t 1313 1 firewire_core
snd_timer 19537 2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
button 4882 1 fglrx
i2c_core 19217 1 i2c_piix4
processor 25265 0
wmi 8061 0
pcspkr 1835 0
sg 25972 0
k10temp 2771 0
serio_raw 4566 0
usbcore 139496 7 uas,usb_storage,usbhid,ohci_hcd,xhci_hcd,ehci_hcd
edac_mce_amd 9223 0
shpchp 26725 0
snd 58906 22 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_seq_device,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore 6161 1 snd
snd_page_alloc 7361 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
pci_hotplug 24687 1 shpchp
ext4 334690 1
mbcache 5802 1 ext4
jbd2 69898 1 ext4
crc16 1313 1 ext4
sd_mod 27120 4
ahci 20465 1
pata_jmicron 2464 0
libahci 17952 1 ahci
pata_acpi 3296 0
libata 169396 4 ahci,pata_jmicron,libahci,pata_acpi
scsi_mod 125814 5 uas,usb_storage,sg,sd_mod,libata
Also my last message on dmesg is:
hda-intel: IRQ timing workaround is activated for card #0. Suggest a bigger bdl_pos_adj.
But there is only one of these lines in the output and the distortion kicks in several times. This was right after the line:
chromium-sandbo (2511): /proc/2509/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/2509/oom_score_adj instead.
So it happened after I opened my web browser (I only just booted this pc up I had it turned off over the night). This is a recurring problem over the past couple of days, BTW. It was probably the last update because when I done it I didn't reboot for awhile.
Last edited by me4tw (2011-04-03 05:03:26)

hi - i had the same problem, but only with vlc - but I love vlc *sad*.
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device 7599
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=slow >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
Latency: 64, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
Interrupt: pin ? routed to IRQ 16
Region 0: Memory at f9ff4000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
lsmod | grep -i snd:
snd_seq_dummy 1455 0
snd_seq_oss 28052 0
snd_seq_midi_event 5332 1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq 48705 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device 5100 3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_pcm_oss 37890 0
snd_mixer_oss 14851 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_hda_codec_realtek 294053 1
snd_hda_intel 21738 2
snd_hda_codec 73739 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel
snd_hwdep 6134 1 snd_hda_codec
snd_pcm 71032 3 snd_pcm_oss,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec
snd_timer 18992 2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd 55132 15 snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_timer
soundcore 5986 1 snd
snd_page_alloc 7017 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
uname -r : 2.6.38-ARCH
the hint with pulse an tsched=0 does help too :-)
@heftig: danke ;-)
Last edited by debijan (2011-04-18 18:03:43)

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