Clicking of snd_hda_intel

I've installed Fedora 9 Beta on a laptop with a snd_hda_intel sound card. Every time that alsa powers up the card (from, I guess, a sleep state) I get a speaker and ear popping *click* before the sound effect. I've found Linux is being very aggressive in powering down my soundcard by setting CONFIG_SND_HDA_POWER_SAVE_DEFAULT=5 (seconds). I was playing with the timeout like this: echo 0 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save So I can actually use my laptop, I've disabled the powersaving doing this: sudo echo “options snd_hda_intel power_save=0” >> /etc/modprobe.conf So, is it:

  • My laptop being crap that it can't power on the soundard with out a DC click.
  • Linux setting a much too low timeout value
  • An ALSA bug that is worth pursuing?

Ideas welcome. Richard.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

One thought on “Clicking of snd_hda_intel”

  1. hi Richard! I guess you've read the ALSA Documentation/powersave.txt, but it's worth mentioning here: “Note that you might hear click noise/pop when changing the power state. Also, it often takes certain time to wake up from the power-down to the active state. These are often hardly to fix, so don't report extra bug reports unless you have a fix patch ;-)”

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