Comment 5 for bug 1716654

I am also affected by this bug.

my system uses these codecs
/proc/asound/card0/codec#0:Codec: ATI R6xx HDMI
/proc/asound/card1/codec#0:Codec: Realtek ALC1220

on an Asus Prime x370a Pro motherboard with a ryzen 1600X.

This problem was first observed in Ubuntu 16.04.3, with kernel 4.4 and the 1201 bios for this board.

The board is now running 3401, and Ubuntu 17.10, in order to have access to a more recent kernel.

I installed the hwe update to 16.04 first, bringing my kernel version to 4.10 or 4.11, but it made the login screen and all terminals distorted and unreadable, so I was unable to test in that state - a state repeated after the clean install of 17.10, but which I found was due to ubuntu trying to set an ultra wide resolution to my 4k monitor, and being unable to display 4k i I corrected by switching from HDMI to Display Link Cable.

In the prior configuration I confirmed that the distortion occurred over the HDMI to my monitor speakers, as well as over the analog jack output. In my case, the distortion sounds identical to the recording made by Gargoyle above, and seemed to come and go in 16.04.3. using pulseaudio -k in a terminal gets rid of the problem for 10 minutes to several hours (or, perhaps it comes and goes away on its own and i miss it).

In addition, if it is of consequence, I had been running Ubuntu 16.04 since launch on a Gigabyte X58A-UD3R board's sound with no problems. After swapping the board to the Asus prime X370a pro 3 weeks ago, this problem appeared.