I have installed Fedora 9 on a Shuttle SN78SH7 which has an nVidia GeForce 8200 chipset. The sound has intermittent scratches and echoes. This is true for any sound: system, MP3's, streams. I changed the PulseAudio daemon.conf sample rate to 48000, but that didn't fix the problem. I Googled for other solutions but I haven't found anything that works for me. I would appreciate any help I can get to fix this problem.

aplay -l:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: ALC883 Analog [ALC883 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: ALC883 Digital [ALC883 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

alsamixer: Card and Chip are set to PulseAudio

sound prefs:

Both "Sound playback" entries set to Autodetect
Default mixer track Device set to HDA NVidia (Alsa mixer)

-Thanks, LloydM

Same problem with a Biostar TF720 A2+. It has the nVidia T720a chipset (GeForce 8100 onboard graphics). Problem was unbearable until I removed the pulse-audio sound server and accessed the ALSA hardware directly. I am using KDE 4 which has an abstraction layer called phonon which doesn't quite look like a sound server. In fact, it was setup to use the pulse-audio sound server as a backend.

After getting rid of the pulse-audio sound server, the sound is a lot better (latency and jitter has gone down) but still scratchy. No more mixed sounds, though. E.g. cannot play a tune in media player and concurrently hear a beep or buzz notification from an email client.

One thing to note: the master volume in my mixer has no channel marked master, but rather two marked "front" which seem to add up to the master volume. This makes me suspect of the auto-guessed configuration. Also, why is the module for this chipset called hda-intel, when the chipset is of nVidia variety?

gd

Thanks for posting this thread. I have the same or similar components--Biostar TF720 A2+, GeForce 8100--and the same problem. I'll try what Greg did. Maybe this motherboard isn't the most Linux-friendly. Since it also has only one IDE port and I had to get an ATA controller card, I wish I had bought a different board.

Hi, I was wondering if you resolved the audio issue with your BIOSTAR TF720 A2+ motherboard. I've used this motherboard extensively in the past for builds with both Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 and had no problems.

A recent iteration of the board appeared on Newegg after it had disappeared for a few weeks. The new version has an updated BIOS that locks out CPUs over 95 Watts. I flashed it back to the previous version so it would allow the CPU, but noticed that when using such a CPU on first boot Ubuntu would act like there was no sound card at all. After updating and rebooting it began working however. Subsequent reboots result it in failing to detect the audio chipset again, even though it's listed with the lspci command.

Any information would be helpful, thanks.

Just for everyone's info, I did a manual yum update last week, and now I don't have the sound problem any more on my Shuttle.

Afraid not. I gave up on it, and hope to get a new motherboard in a few years when the recession ends.