Arch Linux

thriftyb

Member

Registered: 2014-12-19

Posts: 12

PulseAudio: Speakers Pop When Starting X

Hello Everyone,

  When I start X (XFCE is my window manager) the speakers on my Latitude E5540 laptop give a loud pop. This only happens the first time I start X when booting/rebooting (I am not using a display manager.) Audio plays fine otherwise. The daemon.conf file in my home directory has "flat-volumes=no" and changing it to "yes" has no effect. Anyone have any ideas?

thriftyb

hyphone

Member

Registered: 2015-10-02

Posts: 6

Re: PulseAudio: Speakers Pop When Starting X

same here since I updated pulseaudio the last time.

Usually the popping appeared when i had powersaving for my sound controller enabled. Now it happens every time when a sound comes up after some time (audio powersaving disabled in tlp).
Sometimes I don't have sound in VLC at all and i have to mute and unmute the volume several times.

Last edited by hyphone (2015-10-02 07:49:31)

hyphone

Member

Registered: 2015-10-02

Posts: 6

Re: PulseAudio: Speakers Pop When Starting X

downgrading kernel to 4.1.x or using the new LTS version solved the problem for me temporally. lets see if a kernel update will fix this in the future.

SaltySockets

Member

Registered: 2015-10-10

Posts: 22

Re: PulseAudio: Speakers Pop When Starting X

I get the same popping on kernel 4.2. It's fixed in 4.3 so I've compiled 4.3-rc4 and I use that at the moment. It's an issue with the probing and turning on the audio output too fast which makes PulseAudio cause loud pops. I tried to fix this with all the possible settings I could find but I saw a patch commited to 4.3-rc2 which I didn't think addressed this issue since ALSA can play sounds without any pops and the pops come with PulseAudio. The patch submitted to the kernel fixed it for me. I get no pops at all and I'v set the powersaving to 1 second and everything works just fine.

I recommend either downgrading to a kernel that doesn't have this issue (introduced in 4.1.x) or download the 4.3 source and compile yourself. 4.3-rc4 might not be recommended but if you're desperate like I was, give it a try.
I'll stick with kernel 4.3 and jump back to the ARCH kernel once it has caught up with 4.3.

Note: This is a known issue with modern Lenovo laptops with the newest Realtek HD codecs (and maybe other computers as well). Previous changes made for ThinkPads have been adapted to be more generic and should work for newer computers as well, not sure if it only takes ThinkPads into account.

Last edited by SaltySockets (2015-10-11 11:32:16)

hyphone

Member

Registered: 2015-10-02

Posts: 6

Re: PulseAudio: Speakers Pop When Starting X

Thank you for the detailed explanation.
I'm using the LTS for now - also feels quite comfortable being on LTS

thriftyb

Member

Registered: 2014-12-19

Posts: 12

Re: PulseAudio: Speakers Pop When Starting X

Thank you both for your help.