Hiss and noise when adjusting Volume, Balance or Fade in Surround 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 profiles

[Alexey Osipov]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 2
pulseaudio 0.9.21

Three sound devices:
1) Internal HDA Intel
2) PCI Creative SB Audigy 1 ES
3) SAA7134 chip in analog TV tuner card.

By default, PA chooses the first one to output sound.
Then I manually select Audigy for output, then select "Analog Surround 5.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input" for it. Then start playing "InTheCircle.oga" from ~/examples/ folder by Totem. It sounds relatively OK. Then either changing Volume, Balance or Fade causes high hiss and noise from all speakers. Music is still playing in background. Changing the controls back don't help.

This happens on all "Analog Surround 5.0 Output" profiles, all "Analog Surround 5.1 Output" profiles and all "Analog Surround 4.1 Output" profiles.

4.0, Stereo and Mono profiles are OK.

On my main system (Ubuntu 9.10) I don't use PulseAudio at all and Audigy works very well with pure ALSA.

[Alexey Osipov (lion-simba)]

Disappeared with latest updates.

[Alexey Osipov (lion-simba)]

The bug happens again.

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx RC,
pulseaudio version 1:0.9.22~0.9.21+stable-queue-32-g8478-0ubuntu14

Moving "balance" out of center position (a bit or more) makes sound noisy. If moving to the left, noise comes from front right and rear right speakers. If moving to the right, noise comes from the front center speaker and front right speaker.
Moving "fade" out of center position (a bit or more) makes sound noisy. Noise comes from all speakers.
Moving "subwoofer" full left makes sound noisy. Noise comes from rear right speaker.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Do you have indicator-sound from lucid-proposed installed?

[Alexey Osipov (lion-simba)]

Yes.

[Nasser Mohieddin Abukhdeir (nasr-m-a)]

I have a similar problem and found that switching to 7.1 (8 speaker) fixed it. Basically I did the following:

1) Naively plugged in the three stereo cables according the the color coding on the speaker cables (Logitech X-540) and motherboard (Asus M4A785T-M/CSM). Configured system to 5.1 analog, this resulted in whining and poor volume "loudness".

2) Thoroughly compared Logitech's color coding of the speaker cables to my motherboards, found an issue there which was not clear from Asus's documentation to be an issue, but switched plugs around leaving on 5.1 analog, had same problem!

3) Went back to original configuration, switched to 7.1 analog, no problems, great volume and sound quality.

In the end I am not sure if this is a problem with the motherboard's sound outputs being indicated incorrectly and possibly specified incorrectly (wqhich is why I have to use 7.1 and not 5.1, I only have 6 speakers). I am really not sure if this is a bug in Ubuntu or the motherboard embedded sound card (VIA VT1708S).

[cosmix (cosm7x)]

I can confirm that this issue exists when the analog 5.1 (6 speaker) out + stereo in option is selected using the onboard audio on an Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard and a Creative 5.1 speaker set.

Switching to the 'analog 7.1 out + stereo in' option seems to remedy the problem (although I am not sure how it affects output as I only have a 5.1 speaker setup), as reported by Nasser. This seems to be a software issue.

[quequotion (quequotion)]

This is still happening in Lucid. At no point since Karmic has this bug ever gone away.

[zephirum (zephirum)]

I can confirm that the problem still exists in Maverick (not a fresh install), with 5.1 set up - CA0106 Sound Blaster.
I'm keeping the setting as analogue 5.1 output and analogue stereo input because switching to 7.1 appears to route the right side speaker to the subwoofer.

The problem it seems, is that you can't adjust the balance/face/subwoofer or else you get a screeching sound.

Any ideas?

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Please test the version of pulseaudio in maverick-proposed.