In 11.4 I thought my speakers were shorting out since the left speaker is nearly always mute and I had to turn the manual volume up to top and do some stereo adjustment in the mixer to balance the sound correctly though there was still line noise. Now, I have updated to 12.1 and for the last week the audio has worked perfectly… balanced, clear; it was clear now that indeed the problem was not my speakers as I had thought.
02:01.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB0400 Audigy2 Value
Speakers are Boston Acoustics BA745 connected via Digital Stereo IEC958 with mono input
They were literally working perfectly when I upgraded to 12.1 (fresh install if that matters) now they are worse than ever. I hate to think Pulse Audio has really been the culprit this whole time… especially since I can’t do anything about that and have any kind of working sound.
Please help me figure out how to get these back to the beauty they had once, and collect the info to file a robust bug-report.
note
I think it started screwing up again after I had muted the sound. I did that from the mute key on the gateway multimedia keyboard. I doubt the latter would be relevant though.
So, I installed Audacity because I wanted too see just how awful my singing really is (not as bad as I feared) and suddenly, everything is working right again! WTF? I know though Audacity doesn’t use Pulse Audio, and taps straight into Alsa. So it would seem somehow that using Audacity kicked the Pulse Audio server somehow. But, I would still really like to know what is going on here so that it can be fixed. If I weren’t so odd in the way I do things I would rarely trip across either the problems or fixes I find… so, yeah I want to help others that run into this problem.
Note
In 11.4 I had these audio problems, and I tried bypassing PA via the YaST setting and it didn’t help the issue. This would imply that YaST doesn’t really disable PA, or this issue has been a combination of PA and a driver that only just got the update to work nicely.
Was running Clementine and suddenly boom it started doing the weird stuff again. Though this time there isn’t the line noise, there is the issue of it only coming through the right speaker again. In the past the main way I could overcome it besides manually rebalancing the stereo was to turn the speakers ALL the way up and then just keep the system volume very low. This no longer works. Also, though only coming through one channel it isn’t showing as degraded of sound as it had.
Whatever running audacity had done the first time did not work this time. Of note was the first time I ran it there was a ton of feedback, then suddenly it stopped and sounded perfect. This time it just made all the horrid feedback noise and doesn’t seem to respect the system volume at all being incredibly loud… making dogs down the street start barking.
I have tried manually killing the pulseaudio process. After it relaunches itself it seems to lessen the very very slight static coming through the right speaker. I then ran Audacity to see if there was any change. The only change was that the feedback was less.
