Distorted Sound on AC'97

English Hardware
#1

I recently made the switch to Opensuse and I must say I’m enjoying it so far. Unfortunatley, just like everytime I try a linux distribution there just seems to be one little thing that goes wrong that ruins an otherwise good experience! With OpenSUSE I get mild to servere distorted audio on my Intel AC’97 onboard sound. It varies from program to program but all applications with sound show some sign of the problem (Flash, Amorak, Neverball, Prboom etc), this problem was occuring right from a clean install of OpenSUSE 11.1 so I doubt its anything that I have installed since.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? It would be much appreciated because I really don’t want to go back to Windows!

#2

I experienced similar problem. Sound was very-very loud to begin with (even at 4% of volume in Amarok)and on louder volumes it distorted. I just noticed that pulseaudio was being used and thinking I don’t need that, I un-installed pulseaudio. Now everything is working fine…
I’m not saying this is the proper solution but this might work.

Regards,

Yogesh M

#3

One very general tip is to make sure PCM slider is not set too high (ie above 75%). This can cause distortion.

This is also worth a read:

SDB:AudioTroubleshooting - openSUSE