The audio on my Asus laptop behaves very oddly. The first is a relatively minor issue: Whenever I change a volume in, say alsamixer, the sound turns off until I either reboot or enter and leave suspend-to-RAM. The second is fairly annoying: whenever the audio is active, there is a constant noise at a very high pitch; a lot of people can't hear it. I have toyed with the ALSA mixer settings, but I haven't exhausted the possibilities, I think.

My kernel version is 2.6.21.5. I am running Slackware 12. The relevant lspci line is as follows:

I'm not sure about the first problem, setting up my settings then executing "# alsactl store" always worked for me, and I have the same device.
About the high pitched noise, are you sure it's not coming from another device that's interfering with your speakers? I know that my wireless router an phone sometimes do some interference and result in a very annoying lower pitched buzz. Moving some wires around solved the problem.

-A

It is likely that the buzz is some sort of interference, but, as my computer is a laptop, moving around wires is not that practical. It should also be noted that the sound does not occur in Windows; the problem lies somewhere in Linux.

As for the configuration, it also shuts off when a program stops using the sound card, sometimes.

The problem was solved by compiling the newest ALSA drivers.