ALSA click, startup muting (minor?)

[dentonlt]

Juanito/JasonW - you guys have done great work with the ALSA stuff recently. Tons of great reading/help on the forum.

I run an HP Mini 1001 with an Intel HDA card. It works using just the stock alsa.tcel and alsa-modules extensions.

Two concerns:

I get a random, sharp 'click' out of the card when the snd-intel-hda module is loaded. It occurs every 5-15 seconds. Very brief pop. The more I use the card, the more often it happens. No dmesg error or anything else funny.

The speaker volume spans from 50-100, not from 0-100 in alsamixer. Settings from 0-50 are all completely silent. Startup speaker volume is muted, but I think that is normal. I plan to call alsamixer from bootlocal to turn up the speaker setting.

I'll appreciate your advice, esp on the popping/clicking.

[curaga]

If the clicking happens 5 seconds after last played sound (5 secs of complete silence), then it's the power saving kicking in. It can be disabled with one of the module parameters for the snd-hda-intel module.

If not, then there might be low-quality isolation inside the netbook, or low-quality speakers. These things can even change from batch to batch, but it would be worth it to see if anyone else has similar issue with the same netbook, irrespective of OS.

[dentonlt]

Ah! Thanks for mentioning the power-saving option. I'll research and test it out.

The 'unpredictable' timing may indeed be 5 seconds. It happens just after sound plays, or when I'm mucking with settings ... but never really when there is other sound coming out.

--

Yep, you're right. Click comes from power-down on the sound card (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ALSA). The test is to check out the module's power_save parameter. Anything > 0 means power saving is enabled.

Code:

cat /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save

Inevitably, mine showed 5 (enabled). To disable it, I've:

Code:

sudo modprobe -r snd-hda-intel
sudo modprobe -i snd-hda-intel power_save=0

This has to be run each session, so I'll put it in bootlocal. Thanks for the direction.

Call that one closed.