I have an ensoniq sound card, this was correctly detected
by RH7 as an es1371 and the module loads fine.

But whenever there's a sound it is accompanied by crackling, and cuts out all the time.

I have tried various modules.conf changes, but nothing seems
to stop the scratchy noise coming from my speakers.

I noticed the sndstat device is missing also.

Thanks in advance for any help with getting my sound to work properly.

I never heard of such problem. But it might help to create this sndstat device with the command mknod? Major 14, minor 6. Good luck.

I tried to creat sndstat with MAKEDEV, but the this didn't associate with any device.

I'm afraight I cannot help you with this. Maybe you can try to ask RH-support? Sorry I cannot help you out.

Succes

Matthieu

I've got a similar problem on my pentium 133 with sb awe 32.
I haven't figured out really why and how to fix it though.
But I think it is connect somehow with the graphic, in other words X server.
This because if I start a sound and then swithch back to console mode the sound is fine, most of the time.

solved
 

I solved this problem myself. My sound card is actually
a Ensoniq 5880, which is supposed to be supported by the
es1371 module. There is a patch for this module to get
it to work with the 5880. Instead of applying the patch, I installed a more recent version of the kernel, 2.2.17-14. (I was using 2.2.15 before). This kernel contained a fix for this module (and I guess a few other things too ... )

The sound card works fine now.