Whitenoise Problem

StefanMu · 2013-09-13 02:59:15

Hi!
I've been using ArchLinux now for a month and I get along with it very well.

There is still one problem I'm not able to fix yet, so please help me :-|

I like to listen to music, so I bought myself a asus xonar essence stx sound card and Audiotechnica ATH-M50s. The sound itself is very nice, but if I don't listen to music it doesn't get absolutely silent. There is still a little background noise I can't get rid of. It also exists when I listen to songs or watch videos. At the more silent parts I can hear it too. It sounds to me like wind in a microphone just very quiet.
I thought it could be the sound card but there are moments where the problem disappears. There are some seconds after boot, when KDE is up, the Whitenoise is gone and it comes back after I open the first program which plays any kind of sound.
I googled it but there are so many various posts about white noise that I have to ask for my own.

Thanks for your support :-)

palmaway · 2013-09-17 16:04:01

Try to check the mixer settings (for example, with alsamixer from a shell). This kind of thing is usually caused by a (too) high volume in one of the settings, usually "PCM" or "Speakers". If the volume doesn't seem high to you it's probably because it's compensated by a lower level on "Master".

Last edited by palmaway (2013-09-17 16:04:21)

ewaller · 2013-09-17 17:25:49

.... Or an open mic input. Try muting your microphone and analog line in channels. Even ever there is nothing connected, the amplifiers still have a noise floor which will be digitized and mixed in to the output stream.

Edit: BTW, Welcome to Arch Linux

Last edited by ewaller (2013-09-17 17:26:24)

StefanMu · 2013-09-18 22:51:39

Hi, thank you for your replies.

I heard of all your tipps, I already muted every mic channel I could find, and tried various settings. I turned off the input of the soundcard, the WebcamMic, even the Sound Optins of the HDMI input from the Graphics Card. There is only my usb microphone left and if I turn that off nothing changes.
Also the "white noise" doesn't change, even if I mute the Master sound. It is only impossible to get it away, when I change the Output option in Alsamixer from Headphones to Speakers.

The more I try, the more I fear, that it is actually the sound card that is broken but I can't possibly explain how this could have happened.

Do you any more options? Or should I just send it to Asus asking for a new one?

Thank's for you welcome, I really like the Arch community since everyone tries to help each other and everybody is very friendly :-)

sas · 2013-09-18 23:43:12

StefanMu wrote:

Do you any more options? Or should I just send it to Asus asking for a new one?

First I would eliminate the possibility that it's an ALSA problem.

The easiest way to do so, is to (temporarily) switch to OSS v4, which is an alternative sound architecture that does things differently than ALSA.
In my experience the advantages of OSS are:

It's tends to be better at correctly auto-detecting and auto-configuring sound devices.
(In the past I've experiences several cases where a sound card needed manual tweaking of driver options to work with ALSA, or did not work with ALSA at all - whereas with OSS it Just Worked™ out of the box.)
For my card I get a higher maximum sound volume with OSS than with ALSA.
It lets you set sound volume on a per-application basis. (Although PulseAudio, which works on top of ALSA, also provides this feature I think.)

The main disadvantages of OSS are:

It does not have a nice & simple interactive mixer like alsamixer (ossxmix is terribly non-intuitive and user-unfriendly)
Many applications don't have native OSS support, so they need to send their sound through an ALSA-to-OSS emulation layer which is not ideal, and third-party mixers that were designed for ALSA (like KDE's default mixer kmix) won't work with OSS at all.

Thus whether permanently switching to OSS is a good idea is a matter of opinion, but in your case trying it out temporarily just to see if it fixes your problem would definitely make sense.

Follow the installation & testing instructions here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OSS#Install

Last edited by sas (2013-09-18 23:48:37)

StefanMu · 2013-09-23 20:55:57

So, I just researched a little bit again, and I finally found a forum that proofed me what I suspected... The card is a piece of engineering shit!
http://www.head-fi.org/t/546291/white-n … om-44-1khz

Looks like I fucked up, since I own the card since 2 Months and threw away the package.

Can anyone of you see a solution there or have I just to accept, that there will be a white noise forever and my ears will rot in bad sound quality?

Thanks for your support so far! :-)

R00KIE · 2013-09-24 11:15:30

From the thread you linked, it seems that forcing a different sampling rate does help.

If you are using pulseaudio then just change the config in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to force a different default (and alternate) sampling rate.

If you are using only alsa then you can also configure it to resample everything to a higher sampling rate (and possibly bitdepth).

StefanMu · 2013-09-24 22:25:35

Holy shit, I actually think it worked!!

Finally I can listen to music in peace!

Thanks for all your support guys, you are the best

Last edited by StefanMu (2013-09-24 22:30:43)

StefanMu · 2013-10-09 22:02:27

Hi!
So there is a new problem coming up. Maybe it can be solved very fast!

Resampling actually solved the problem but at the moment it is only temporary. I change the sampling rate - everything is fine after restarting. I shut down, next day the whitenoise is back! I change the sampling rate, restart, and the whitenoise is gone. Restart and it is here again. Repeat from here.

Do you guys know why this is happening?
I'm pretty frustrated because of it, pleeease help :-)

eDio · 2013-10-09 22:22:33

This might be irrelevant, but I think it's a good practice anyway: do not use your "music" soundcard for regular needs, like system sounds, skype, flash videos, etc..
Use only pure alsa and do not use dmix (that's a plugin, which allows sharing of device among multiple sources).

I was going to give you advice to buy a compact mixer (Mackie 402-VLZ3 does very good job!) and have pleasure listening to your music without noises and disturbance. But now I see that Asus Xonar has dedicated headphones output. It's pity to waste it.

In such case, another possibility is to connect digital output of your onboard audio to the digital input of your Xonar and turn on monitoring of this input for Xonar. I'm not sure, though, that Xonar supports this well (soundcard should have multichannel DAC, that is able to work with arbitrary clock frequency). But it won't hurt if you try

brebs · 2013-10-09 22:51:36

StefanMu wrote:

I shut down, next day the whitenoise is back

Set up your soundcard in a startup script.

R00KIE · 2013-10-11 09:16:14

If you tell us how you actually forced a different sampling rate maybe we can be of more help.

On another note, KDE does like to do its thing with audio, from the few short experiences with KDE that I've had, I never got to understand exactly how it works, so if you provide more info maybe someone that uses KDE regularly will be able to help you.

StefanMu · 2013-10-15 20:22:25

I changed the sampling rate from 41XXXsomething to 96000 in /etc/pulse/deamon.conf.

When it doesn't work I change it to 196000 and restart and it works again. When it does't work again I change it back to 96000, restart and it works again.

After some time, I found out, that if I close programs before I shut down like Chrome, Clementine and so on, it doesn't seem to stop it working. So maybe something doesn't get along with pulseaudio when the session is restored at startup.

R00KIE · 2013-10-16 16:46:38

Post the config file, otherwise just playing guessing game.

StefanMu · 2013-10-16 21:39:46

# This file is part of PulseAudio.
#
# PulseAudio is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# PulseAudio is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
# WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
# along with PulseAudio; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307
# USA.

## Configuration file for the PulseAudio daemon. See pulse-daemon.conf(5) for
## more information. Default values are commented out. Use either ; or # for
## commenting.

; daemonize = no
; fail = yes
; allow-module-loading = yes
; allow-exit = yes
; use-pid-file = yes
; system-instance = no
; local-server-type = user
; enable-shm = yes
; shm-size-bytes = 0 # setting this 0 will use the system-default, usually 64 MiB
; lock-memory = no
; cpu-limit = no

; high-priority = yes
; nice-level = -11

; realtime-scheduling = yes
; realtime-priority = 5

exit-idle-time=0
; exit-idle-time = 20
; scache-idle-time = 20

; dl-search-path = (depends on architecture)

; load-default-script-file = yes
; default-script-file = /etc/pulse/default.pa

; log-target = auto
; log-level = notice
; log-meta = no
; log-time = no
; log-backtrace = 0

resample-method=speex-float-0
; resample-method = speex-float-3
; enable-remixing = yes
; enable-lfe-remixing = no

; flat-volumes = yes

; rlimit-fsize = -1
; rlimit-data = -1
; rlimit-stack = -1
; rlimit-core = -1
; rlimit-as = -1
; rlimit-rss = -1
; rlimit-nproc = -1
; rlimit-nofile = 256
; rlimit-memlock = -1
; rlimit-locks = -1
; rlimit-sigpending = -1
; rlimit-msgqueue = -1
; rlimit-nice = 31
; rlimit-rtprio = 9
; rlimit-rttime = 1000000

; default-sample-format = s24le
; default-sample-rate = 96000
; alternate-sample-rate = 96000
; default-sample-channels = 2
; default-channel-map = front-left,front-right

; default-fragments = 4
; default-fragment-size-msec = 25

; enable-deferred-volume = yes
; deferred-volume-safety-margin-usec = 8000
; deferred-volume-extra-delay-usec = 0

R00KIE · 2013-10-16 21:54:38

Try leaving this lines uncommented (without ';'):

; default-sample-rate = 96000
; alternate-sample-rate = 96000

You might also leave "; default-sample-format = s24le" uncommented if you want to change the default sample format.

StefanMu · 2013-10-17 23:38:39

Thx!

I'll test it! If I can't recreate my old issues I'll give a report in a view days!

StefanMu · 2013-10-18 00:32:33

Since I have your attention, I have another question.

I get a popping sound when starting/stopping tracks.

Also when I turn the volume up or down.

I already tried typing "modprobe snd_hda_intel power_save=0" into the command line. Since nothing changed I tried to put "options snd_hda_intel power_save=0" and "options snd_hda_intel power_save=0 power_save_controller=N" as described in the ArchWiki into /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf.

It doesn't do anything. Is there something I'm missing?

R00KIE · 2013-10-18 16:06:38

The pops when changing volume could be normal, the change in volume is discrete and sudden so you can hear a pop. About the pop when changing tracks, try fiddling with exit-idle-time but I'm not sure it will help. Do try different sampling rates (make sure you really are using the rates you think you are using) and/or bitdepth.

I would also try with plain alsa and see if the pops when starting/stopping tracks also happen.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-09-13 02:59:15

Whitenoise Problem

#2 2013-09-17 16:04:01

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#3 2013-09-17 17:25:49

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#4 2013-09-18 22:51:39

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#5 2013-09-18 23:43:12

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#6 2013-09-23 20:55:57

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#7 2013-09-24 11:15:30

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#8 2013-09-24 22:25:35

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#9 2013-10-09 22:02:27

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#10 2013-10-09 22:22:33

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#11 2013-10-09 22:51:36

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#12 2013-10-11 09:16:14

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#13 2013-10-15 20:22:25

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#14 2013-10-16 16:46:38

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#15 2013-10-16 21:39:46

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#16 2013-10-16 21:54:38

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#17 2013-10-17 23:38:39

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#18 2013-10-18 00:32:33

Re: Whitenoise Problem

#19 2013-10-18 16:06:38

Re: Whitenoise Problem

Board footer