Choppy sound on HDA-Intel soundcard

[BillBazilla]

The sound on my HP Pavilion dv7-1030eg laptop does not work correctly after a fresh Ubuntu install (tested for 8.04, 8.10 and 9.04 beta). The sound is "choppy" and prolonged (i.e. the standard "login screen ready"-sound which should last 1 sec instead lasts for approx. 20 secs).

Here some additional info:
output from: cat /proc/asound/cards

 0 [Intel ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
                      HDA Intel at 0xdf300000 irq 22

output from: head -n 1 /proc/asound/card0/codec*

==> /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 <==
Codec: IDT 92HD71B7X

==> /proc/asound/card0/codec#2 <==
Codec: Generic 10de ID 6

You can fix this problem by adding the following line to the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file:
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1

With this option the sound works correctly, however, the volume sliders seem to work in an "exponential" way: the first 50% you can't hear anything, on 75% volume it's still very quiet and up to 100% volume raises very quickly.
I haven't found any fix for this.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: linux-image-2.6.27-11-generic 2.6.27-11.27
ProcCmdLine: root=UUID=d7e36de6-e3ad-406a-abfc-f1ecdca073e0 ro quiet splash
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=de_AT.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.27-11.27-generic
SourcePackage: linux

[Peter Whittaker (pwwnow)]

I'm marking this as confirmed based on similar behavior on my dv7 and a workaround that could form the basis for a fix. The workaround is to add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1

I write "workaround, not fix", for at least two reasons:

1. The user should not have to do this, and, more importantly,

2. After a recent round of updates, this file disappeared for me, but it's entire contents were copied to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf - and the problem returned! When I did "cp -p /etc/modprobe/alsa-base.conf /etc/modprobe/alsa-base" and rebooted, the problem went away, sound was good again.

In other words, sound was as described in this report, I added that line, sound was good, there were recent upgrades (between June 15 and June 22), sound went bad again, I cp'd the file as described, sound is good.

The fix would be to have this option set by default for the dv7 series. This problem is known to the community, refer to these sites:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=331172
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting/#Having%20sound%20issues%20with%20HP%20dvx%20laptop

Refer also to bug# 269012 - one of these may be a dupe of the other.

[Rodrigo Burim (rodrigo.burim)]

I have the same problem using Ubuntu 9.04 on HP dv4-1125br.

[Peter Whittaker (pwwnow)]

I've marked this as "fix released" since I just installed Karmic and the problem is gone: Sound works fine on my DV7.