Comment 63 for bug 996906

So I've bought a laptop with VIA sound as well and it also have skips/stutters. I worked around it on both systems with these steps:

1) in /etc/pulse/default.pa added tsched=0:
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

2) to reduce latency set in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:
default-fragments = 4
default-fragment-size-msec = 1

The final latency is a product of these numbers, 1*4 == 4 ms which is acceptable. The number of fragments should be at least 2 so the least latency possible is 2*1 == 2 ms. I don't know if there's a real difference between 4 fragments of 1 ms each or 2 fragments of 2 ms each. Try some experimenting. At least now I don't have latency increase and sound doesn't skip on pavucontrol launch, though it still skips on LMMS launch.

Based on the comments' content and timestamps here, it looks to me that no one in PA team really cares about HDA Intel cards which are the most popular cards. And if PA performs badly with them out of the box it hurts PA's face, no matter who's to blame actually. Plus, pure ALSA works fine or doesn't work at all, usually.