Comment 0 for bug 359361

When playing sound in Jaunty out of my HDA Intel SPDIF out, loud sounds clip. This is audible because from the strong distortion it produces, which I have seen some people characterize as "crackling". For example, if I go to system->preferences->sound and play the test sound, the sinusoid is audibly clipping. I have all of my sliders in alsamixer zeroed except for master (@100) and IEC958 (@100). Note that if I turn down the volume of the master and/or the IEC958, the clipping is still present---I've gone as low as -21dB (64/100) on both sliders simultaneously, and the clipping is still there.

I looked around for solutions, this sounds similar to my problem:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/285866

However, as I noted, I've tried reducing my levels, and my PCM mixer level is all the way at 0 (-58.50 dB) anyway. Not to mention that these are digital outputs, so having them at the 0dB gain position (100% for the master and IEC958 sliders) should be fine...

Yes I am certain it's not my speakers clipping.

Oddly enough, at one point I was able to get it not to clip in the gnome sound settings control by going through some sequence of trying different backends (various options for ALSA, for OSS, etc.). I have not been able to reliably reproduce the non-clipping, but I will keep trying.

For some reason, I hear the clipping when I listen to music using gnome-listen, but not when using Amarok using Xine as the backend.

Please help me stop the clipping.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
ArecordDevices:
 **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: AD198x Analog [AD198x Analog]
   Subdevices: 2/2
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
   Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
AudioDevicesInUse: Error: command ['fuser', '-v', '/dev/dsp', '/dev/snd/controlC0', '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0c', '/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p', '/dev/snd/pcmC0D1p', '/dev/snd/seq', '/dev/snd/timer', '/dev/sequencer2', '/dev/sequencer'] failed with exit code 1:
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'Intel'/'HDA Intel at 0xfe020000 irq 17'
   Mixer name : 'Analog Devices AD1984'
   Components : 'HDA:11d41984,17aa20d7,00100400'
   Controls : 30
   Simple ctrls : 19
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: alsa-base 1.0.18.dfsg-1ubuntu8
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: alsa-driver
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64